December 10, 2022. Possibly the world’s greatest ginger snap. If you’re passing around a cookie plate after dinner, this is what you want on it. If you want to give a gift of homemade cookies, these are the ones you want to give. And if you want to fill your entire home with the best holiday aroma, these are the cookies you want in your oven.

Yes, I’ve told you before about the now legendary Colleen’s Ginger Snaps. And how even I could learn to make them. Just 12 minutes of vigorous sifting, creaming and stirring. But some of you wrote to ask, Just?

Personally, I thought this was a great Way to add a 12-minute aerobic workout to my day. But I understand that you might not agree. So I just tried a quick, easy Way to convert the same ingredients into the same superior ginger snap dough. I put everything into my food processor. And I’m really happy to report that, yes, you can get the same great cookies with a 2.5-minute spin in the processor! The ingredients are listed below. Here’s the Way:

Instead of sifting the dry ingredients to evenly distribute the ginger, cinnamon, salt and baking soda throughout the flour, just pour them into the processor and press play. They’re sifted in 15 seconds. Now pour them into a bowl to make way for the wet ingredients.

First in: the sugar and butter. 20 seconds does it. Then the eggs for 20 seconds. Now the molasses for another 15 seconds of spinning. At this point, you’ve got a perfectly smooth and even mixture that’s pretty wet and sticky. Time to add the already-spun dry ingredients. One cup at a time. 10 seconds of spinning before adding each next cup. For a perfectly smooth, even cookie dough that’s less wet, more firm and still sticky.

Spoon and scrape your dough into a bowl, cover it and put it in the fridge for at least two hours. It’ll become firmer and stiffer, the way it should be before you form your little cookie dough balls and put them in the oven. The dough lasts for weeks in the fridge, so this is one of those Slower time-release gifts. Bake a dozen and eat them. Bake another dozen and wrap them up with a ribbon for someone else. Put the rest of the dough in a plastic container for the gift that keeps on baking. In your own oven or the oven of some lucky person who receives your slightly unusual gift of homemade cookie dough.

When it’s time for you or that lucky someone to bake cookies, put some parchment paper or a Silpat mat on your baking sheet. Then use a soup spoon or your hands to scoop small balls of dough – golf ball size – from the big refrigerated dough mass. Don’t bother to completely flatten or carefully shape them. While they bake, they’ll flatten out and turn themselves into familiar cookie shapes.

Then into your preheated 350 F oven for ten or twelve minutes. Check them so they turn out exactly the way you like them. Take them out a little early for a soft gingerbread feel. Leave them in longer if you like them a little dark and crisp around the edges but still soft and chewy in the middle. Any Way you like them, let them cool and solidify for ten minutes after you take them out. That’s still the hardest part. But I know you can do it.

Ingredients
For 5 – 6 dozen ginger snaps, depending on size.
Dry Mixture:
4.5 cups of all-purpose white flour
1.5 teaspoons of powdered cinnamon
4 tablespoons of high quality powdered ginger
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of baking soda

Wet Mixture:
2 cups (4 sticks) of soft, room temperature butter, cut into 1/2″ cubes
2.5 cups of dark brown sugar (dark “Muscovado” is best)
3 eggs
3/4-cup of molasses

Cost-Benefit Analysis
$4.25 in ingredients and a few minutes of your time gets you 5 or 6 dozen mindblowingly great cookies. Maybe the Best Homemade Christmas Gift Ever.

Cost Comparison
Today’s Way makes 80 ounces of hot, fresh, aromatic, just-out-of-the-oven cookies. That’s about 5 cents per ounce. A box of Nabisco’s Old Fashioned Ginger Snaps with the 12-month shelf life: 37 cents per ounce. Really. More than 7 times more expensive than your great homemade ones. Better is Cheaper.

Let’s Do The Math
Ours: 96 calories per ounce. Nabisco’s: 120. A huge one of ours is about an ounce. That’s about 25 minutes of stretching exercises. A 20-minute walk. 15 minutes of snow-shoveling. Have a couple and get out there.