Rolled Ginger Cookies, Page 123, 1st Column, 1st Recipe

This week's recipe is Rolled Ginger Cookies, so another cookie requiring the rolling pin.  At first glance the recipe is huge!  It calls for 5 cups of flour, so I think I’m going to have a huge amount of cookies from this.

This recipe from allrecipes.com is very close: Gingerbread Cutouts but it has baking powder in addition to soda which is not in my recipe.  And mine had a bit more ginger too.  Also this recipe is effectively half the amount of the one I’m using from my old cook book.
Now in my other books I found that the recipe in the two most recent versions is basically exactly the same recipe as the one from allrecipes.com.  Which probably means someone just copied it up there from the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.  My 1981 version is identical to the 1976 one.  For 1953 the proportions and ingredients change a bit.  Biggest difference is the cloves are not included. And in the 1936 book, it’s not even there.  But there is a type of molasses cookie.  

So this recipe is pretty standard again, cream sugar, shortening, add other wet ingredients then mix the dry stuff and mix in.  But this time it was just a huge amount!  I let it cool in the fridge for a day, although they only suggested 3 hours.

I used the rolling pin rings again, and you can see how they restricted the width of the dough.  So I could only roll our small amounts at a time.
 
This time as I rolled and cut out cookies I tried saving all the scraps together.  Then combined them at the end, but they definitely get dry from the extra flour, and the cookies don’t come out looking as good.  Maybe a better choice would be to fold them into new batches of dough as I do them.  May have to try that next time.

       

The interesting thing was that these were rolled out to ⅛ inch and then baked for only 5-6 minutes.  So although they took some time to cut out, they were quick otherwise.  I baked them 5.5 minutes, but I’m thinking 6 would have been better.  They were still a tiny bit soft inside, not completely crispy.  As a result, when I boxed them to bring to work, that remaining moisture softened the cookies completely, so they were no longer crunchy at all.

 
They went well at work, but I think they would have gone better a little crispier.

Lessons Learned:

Try folding in scraps with fresh dough to decrease the impact of the flour.

Cook just a tad longer, and perhaps let dry longer on the rack so they retain their crispiness when packaged up for taking somewhere.

I used apple cider vinegar, but in the 1953 edition of the recipe they specify white vinegar.  Should probably try that instead next time.