Molasses Ginger Snap Cookies @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: Since it's not the New Year yet, and we have one last holiday to pack in before kicking 2021 to the sideline, I thought we needed one last cookie recipe. I included molasses cookies in my first Key West mystery, AN APPETITE FOR MURDER. (I believe I borrowed that recipe from my sister-in-law.) These cookies are a little crunchier and also a bit spicier, especially if you get a bite with the fresh ginger in it. Feel free to increase the flavors you like by punching them up a little. I could imagine these served with a small bowl of vanilla or coffee ice cream...or maybe as a pick-me-up with a cup of tea in the afternoon.

I did not use the chai but did include vanilla!

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter, room temp

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup white sugar

¼ cup molasses

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1 and 1/2 tsp baking soda

2 cups flour

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

Several grinds of fresh pepper

1/4 tsp salt

1 tablespoon fresh ginger, grated

Sugar for rolling

Beat the butter with the sugars until light and fluffy Add the molasses, vanilla, fresh ginger, and egg. 

Beat gently. Sift together flour, soda, ginger, cinnamon, and salt, add to first mixture. 

Mix well and chill for at least an hour, to overnight. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let sit for half an hour.

 Form the dough into 1-inch balls and roll them in sugar. 

Place on a parchment-covered cookie sheet 2 inches apart and bake at 350 for about ten minutes until the tops begin to brown and crack. Cool on a wire rack.

In addition to Lucy's Key West food critic mysteries, she's written a thriller called Unsafe Haven! 

About Unsafe Haven: A chance meeting on the New York subway leads to the destinies of two very different women becoming intertwined with terrifying consequences in this nerve-jangling thriller.

Sixteen-year-old Addison is on the run. She's leaving her life on New York's streets behind for a new one with Rafe, armed with just his phone number on a scrap of paper. She's taking the subway to meet him in New Jersey. He'll take care of her. Or so she thinks . . .

Elizabeth Brown's world has fallen apart and she's thinking about her newly ex-fiancé. Until she locks eyes with a teenage girl while waiting for the train doors to open, and a bundle is thrust into her arms as she leaves the subway. A baby, wrapped in a dirty coat.

Elizabeth phones the number she finds in the coat pocket. Then wishes she hadn't. Someone wants Addison and the baby. And they'll do whatever it takes to get them . . .

In a major departure from her lighthearted Key West mysteries, Burdette invites readers into the world of a chilling thriller. (Unsafe Haven is) a page-turner highlighting the problem of exploited runaways.

—Kirkus Reviews

If you'd like a nibble before you buy, read the first chapter here. And if you'd like to read more about the genesis of the book, read this post from Jungle Red Writers.

Ways to buy your copy of UNSAFE HAVEN:

Book depository 

Indiebound 

Barnes and Noble 

Amazon 

Severn House 

And if this is not in your budget (which I totally get,) you can invite your local library to order a copy!

Ginger Syrup Cookies

A few weeks ago I came up with a recipe for ginger lemonade, and I think for me it’s going to be a summer staple. If summer ever arrives, that is--my heat's still on.

I seemed to recall having a bottle of ginger syrup lurking in my pantry closet, but I couldn’t find it when I was making that recipe, so I gave directions for making it. It’s not hard, but it does take a bit of time and planning (and I hate peeling ginger).

But because temperatures where I live have been hovering around 50 degrees (yes, I know it’s June), I started thinking about making ginger cookies—but not the traditional molasses-based ones. I wanted all ginger! And guess what? That missing bottle of ginger syrup miraculously reappeared! An omen! (Of course I hurried to order more, before I forgot the name.) Then I hunted down a recipe, improvised a bit, and voila! Ginger cookies.

Ingredients:

1 cup unsalted butter at room 

temperature1 cup sugar
1/2 cup ginger syrup
3-1/2 cups unbleached flour
2-1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1-1/2 tsp cinnamon
1-1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
2 large eggs
sugar for decorating (demerara sugar gives a nice crunch)


Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease two baking sheets.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until they're light. Beat in the syrup. 

Sift together the flour, baking soda, salt and spices. Add to the butter-sugar mixture and combine.

Add the eggs and beat. (Be sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl.)

Using a tablespoon (I have a soup spoon that was my grandmother’s, which is the perfect size), scoop the dough into balls (about 1-1/2 inch in diameter). Roll in sugar.

Rolled in sugar

Place on the baking sheets, about 2-1/2 inches apart (they will spread a bit).

Bake for 10 minutes (they will still be soft and puffy). Remove from the oven and cool on the sheets for about 10 minutes. Transfer to racks to finish cooling.

The recipe makes a lot of cookies--between 3 and 4 dozen. You could cut it down or share with neighbors!

The results? These are delightfully moist and chewy, and a bit lighter than the molasses variety. And they smell wonderful!

Books? You want books? Nothing new coming until November (A Late Frost, Orchard Mystery #11). But 2018 promises to be very busy, with a new County Cork Mystery in January (Many a Twist), a new series beginning in June, a new Relatively Dead mystery in the spring, and a new Orchard Mystery in the fall. Yikes! I'm exhausted just looking at the list.

They will be joining their friends:

Sweet Zombies

A very warm welcome to our friend, Janet Bolin. Janet writes the Threadville Mysteries. Set in Pennsylvania, Threadville is a charming town dedicated to the sewing arts. It's the place to go for fabric, threads, embroidery threads, quilting supplies, buttons and bows, and and occasional murder!

And now, Janet!

Thank you, Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen, for inviting me to post again. Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen is one of my favorite blogs—and I tend to look here first when I need a recipe.

My fourth Threadville Mystery, NIGHT OF THE LIVING THREAD, comes out on June 3.  When Daryl Wood Gerber AKA Avery Aames suggested the title, I knew I had to use it. Thank you Daryl/Avery!

“Living thread?” How can embroidery thread be alive?

It can’t, but it can glow in the dark and tremble in the breezes and appear to move around by itself. And if that isn’t freaky enough, NIGHT OF THE LIVING THREAD also involves ancient Egyptian curses, a wedding, a craft fair, and people dressing up like zombies and scaring the folks of Threadville. It’s all good fun until one of the craft fair participants is actually killed by a “killer” wedding gown, and the bride becomes a suspect...

That’s when our intrepid machine embroider, Willow, and her Threadville friends, helped and hindered by the bride’s outspoken mother, decide it’s time to figure out who really killed the victim. The gown couldn’t have acted by itself. Willow and the Threadville gang have to snoop in the rooms of their houseguests and creep through a haunted graveyard (styled after the Evans City Cemetery, which is not far from Threadville, and where scenes of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD were filmed) to unmask a killer.

In honor of the launch of NIGHT OF THE LIVING THREAD, I created this recipe. Beware. These cookies aren’t genteel like gingerbread men, which include other spices and molasses to temper the ginger. These zombies contain lots of ginger. They might bite back.

ZOMBIE COOKIES

Adapted from the recipe on the back of my Undead Fred cookie cutter package

Ingredients:

3 cups all-purpose flour (I used whole wheat to give my zombies icky-looking skin—if you’re going to frost the cookies and/or are not fond of the taste or sturdy texture of whole wheat flour, substitute white flour for all or part of it.)

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons ground ginger

3/4 cup butter (you could use up to 1 cup), room temperature

2 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup chopped candied ginger

2 large eggs

1 heaping tablespoon ginger paste

Skim milk (about 1/2 cup)

Method:

Stir flour, baking soda, and ground ginger together with a whisk or a fork.

With your mixer, cream sugar and butter. My butter wasn’t warm enough, so I made little butter tombstones and stood them in the sugar to speed the warming. And you need tombstones to create proper zombies, right?

Beat in eggs, candied ginger, and ginger paste until well blended.

Add flour mixture and stir at low speed until blended.

Add milk and blend at low speed until dough will stick together. Don’t let it become soggy.

Divide dough in half.

Roll out to about 1/4 inch between sheets of parchment paper.

Refrigerate for 1/2 hour.

Peel off parchment paper and place dough on floured surface. Cut out.

Bake on silicone baking pad for about 20 minutes at 325 degrees. Cool. These become more gingery after a day...

Those who are good at decorating cookies, please go wild.

Sweet and buttery graveyard.

The right consistency.

Ready to cut.

 

Zombie Apocalypse!

The first three Threadville Mysteries are DIRE THREADS, THREADED FOR TROUBLE, and THREAD AND BURIED. Janet’s working on the fifth one, SEVEN THREADLY SINS.

In addition to reading, writing, and walking dogs, Janet’s hobbies include sewing, knitting, and machine embroidery, including using software and killer (!) sewing machines to create original embroidery designs.

http://ThreadvilleMysteries.com/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Janet-Bolin/267325191115

@JanetBolin

Janet is giving away a copy of 

NIGHT OF THE LIVING THREAD! 

Please leave a comment to enter!