mix, mix…stir, stir

Molasses spice cookies and fall go together perfectly. The warm biting flavors of spice and molasses will leave you primed for the shift to soul satisfying wintery soups, roasted root vegetables and pumpkin pie.

The Tuesday with Dorie group is approaching the recipe selections for November as a bit of a free-for-all allowing us to bake the them in any order. These cookies are technically slated for the week of November 17^th, so I won’t be able to link to the recipe until then. I moved this selection up because I thought they would be a perfect treat to take to the stores selling SpiceCare on Halloween dressed in my Julia Child costume.

These cookies hit all the marks for a molasses spice cookie, and would have been even better if I hadn’t been low on molasses and filled the gap with honey.  Before baking, the dough balls are rolled in sugar, and opportunities like these are exactly why I save the sugar from the bottom of containers of crystallized ginger! Rather than hand roll each dough ball, I simply used a small ice cream scoop to portion and shape the dough; it was much faster.  To ensure the centers retained a bit of chewiness, I under baked them,  but you could easily let these go to the crispy ginger snap stage if you want a great dunking cookie.

A nice added spice twist that Dorie throws in the recipe is the addition of black pepper.  As I was reaching for the black pepper it occurred to me to try green peppercorns. One whiff of the freshly ground green peppercorn powder and I became fascinated by the idea of using green pepper in baked goods. Pepper in desserts isn’t an unfamiliar thing at all, but I have never seen green pepper used. It has fresh floral and slightly herbyaroma that is quite different from black pepper, and green pepper doesn’t have the same level of pungent heat that black pepper has. I could pick up the green pepper quite distinctly in the dough, but once baked, it blended in with the other spice flavors and I wasn’t able to distinguish it. Next time I will just use a little more, I think I added about ¼ teaspoon and will bump that up to ½ teaspoon and see how it tastes. You can read more about green pepper in the Spice Library and also check out the wonderful White Pepper Shortbread recipe from Gale Gand.

Pamela of Cookies with the Boys selected this recipe. Visit her blog for the recipe (remember recipe won’t be posted until Nov. 17^th).

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 98 recipes completed 123 to go!