Spiced Molasses Cookies With Apple and Ginger
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This is a creative apple-ginger take on chewy molasses cookies. Chopped candied ginger and dried apples top each cookie, mosaic-like, along with demerara sugar for a touch of crunch. They’re almost savory with a little bit of miso and a pinch of salt to complement punchy blackstrap molasses.
Baker Sharon Brenner achieves a fudgy texture partly by keeping a careful eye on indicators of doneness, which is a little more challenging with a darker cookie. One sign: Your kitchen will be filled with the scent of warm spices. The cookies will be set, but the edges shouldn’t brown — check the bottoms for a more golden color than the tops.
Another pro tip: Once she takes them out of the oven, she gives the tops a light tap with the bottom of a glass so that they don’t mound. “I like a thick cookie with textural variation and some body in the middle,” Brenner says, “but I’m not looking for a mountain of cookie.”
The winning cookies from the L.A. Times Holiday Cookie Bake-Off include sweet potato whoopie pies, mini versions of the Christmas bread stollen, orange-flecked frosted ones, cookie bark, cream wafers, spiced molasses cookies and more.
In the bowl of a stand mixer add the brown sugar, granulated sugar and butter. In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients: all-purpose flour, five-spice, pumpkin pie spice, salt, baking power and baking soda. Set aside.
Measure and roughly chop the candied ginger into small pea-size pieces and transfer them to a small bowl. Roughly chop the dried apple. They may be hard to cut so just do your best to have them more or less match the ginger pieces. Add them to the bowl with the chopped candied ginger. Roughly combine, then set aside.
Make the cookies: Using the whisk attachment of a stand mixer, mix the butter, brown sugar and white sugar on low speed until combined and lightly fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the molasses and combine on low speed for 1 minute, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed to ensure all ingredients are incorporated evenly.
Switch to a paddle attachment, removing any excess butter-sugar mixture from the whisk. Add the egg and vanilla, mix for 1 minute on low speed until combined. Add miso paste, mix on low speed until combined.
Add the dry ingredients, initially using a spatula to roughly combine. Then continue mixing with paddle attachment on low speed until ingredients are just combined and no flour is visible in the cookie dough. Add half of the apple-ginger mixture to the cookie dough and mix on low speed to just combine — a few seconds is enough.
Line a large plate or quarter sheet pan with parchment paper. Using a medium-sized cookie scoop or ice cream scoop, scoop the cookie dough into 10 to 12 dough balls. Lightly tap the top of each dough ball into the bowl with the apple-ginger mixture to decorate the tops of the cookies.
Repeat until all the cookie dough balls are prepared. Cover the plate or sheet pan with a lid or plastic wrap, and chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours, preferably overnight.
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove the cookie dough balls from the refrigerator. Place the demerara sugar in a small bowl and dip the top of each cookie so the sugar sticks to the dough ball. If some of the decorative apple-ginger pieces fall off, place them back onto the dough ball. Arrange the dough balls evenly on two parchment-lined baking sheets.
Bake the cookies until the edges are set, the bottoms are slightly golden and the aroma of spiced molasses fills the kitchen, 14 to 15 minutes. It is harder to use browning as an indicator of doneness here due to the cookies’ dark color, but the texture of these should be chewy. Set aside to cool for 20 minutes on the baking sheets. These cookies are great a few hours after baking or even the next day. Store in an airtight container for up to 3 days.
