Ginger Snap Debate

For the past several days my spouse and had been talking about what Christmas Cookies to bake this season. My wife found a recipe for a ginger snap that was more like a chocolate crinkle. Like the chocolate crinkle the dough is made into a ball and then coated in powdered sugar, and when baked the dough falls slightly into a standard cookie, but with the coating no longer uniform but showing valleys, and somewhat soft. She made the recipe and of course they were good. The ginger snap version is like that chocolate crinkle, but a different color and taste due to the ginger. This brought on the great ginger snap debate of 2022. She knows that the chocolate crinkle was my favorite cookie growing up, so the ginger snap was a play on my childhood favorite cookie, ginger in lieu of chocolate.

The standard ginger snap, of course, is a harder cookie, and for Christmas it is dipped partway in white chocolate. Discussing what cookies to make on Monday, I mentioned that we should make ginger snaps and the wife intones, you mean the better cookie. I asked what she meant by using the word better, and she was loading the phrase and being judgmental on our standard recipe. She gave one of her slight, maven smiles, which acknowledge that yes that is what she was doing and she was not going to back off. I now realize why she made this softer cookie recipe a few weeks ago, to get my buy in. The ginger snap debate went on. I offered that we rotate the recipe each season, but she would have none of that. I indicated that we could make her recipe but do some with white chocolate rather than the powdered sugar, but she responded both recipes are rather different. I do not think she liked the idea of dipping her softer dough cookie into white chocolate.

2022 Ginger Snaps
Notice the difference as to baking

In the end, we were thinking about making both (I think she has now decided not to make her better cookie recipe this year), so I started on the standard recipe, although I agreed to half the recipe. The full recipe makes a great many cookies, and I could understand her ambivalence, after all they are one of the last cookies to be fully gone. This is because the full recipe makes so many, not because they are not well liked to eat. 

She was kind enough to get the ingredients out, and placed out two eggs, along with the containers of the varied other ingredients, like flour, sugar, vegetable oil, molasses, ginger and whatever else may have gone in. I made sure to follow the half measures, written on the right side of the ingredient, not the full measure, which was written to the left side of the ingredient. When I got to the eggs, I cracked both, and as I was looking at the next ingredient I realized it should have only been one egg. Of course I now had one egg too many, although she removed the yolk. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would have thought I had been sabotaged. Less tasty ginger snaps for the Christmas holidays. But, no, I figured it was just a rare oversight on her part. Come to think of it, her oversights are so rare, was it really was sabotage?  We had recently watched the movie "Where the Crawdad's Sing" and the Swamp Girl pulled off a fast one killing a man. Was Land Girl pulling a fast one on me? When it came time to form the cookies, the dough was quite sticky, so we added more flour. I thought it was the egg, she thinks it is because I have a lackadaisical approach to the flour, where I use my finger to level it off, which, she said, causes it to be concave. She is very exacting. I also did not tap to make sure air pockets were out. I suppose, it could have been a combination of the two. After baking the cookies were not as well formed as in prior years so I think something happened.

Stock photo of ginger snaps from Google

I am not sure how they will taste, but I am hoping as good as usual. The cookies were on two different sheets, and were switched halfway through baking, but while the cookies on each rack looked the same, the appearance varied by rack.  The lower rack (see top row in first photo) came out looking different than the top rack, and were flatter than usual.

How is it that a woman who eats herring, sauerkraut, and drinks kombucha, can not like ginger snap cookies, or what I now have to call standard (maybe the best) ginger snap cookies? The white chocolate coating provides a complimentary taste for the discerning palette to the ginger snap itself. Perhaps, as a compromise we can do her recipe and mix some white chocolate chips or chunks in part of the dough to see how they turn out. After we completed a few cookie recipes today, she commented that she may not make her ginger snap recipe. That is too bad, since it would be good to compare the two side by side. The great ginger snap debate of 2022 has been settled, so far, but for some reason I am concerned that I may have won the battle, but lost the war. After all, how often does a woman lose a discussion point, or more to the point how often do I win a discussion with the wife?  So far, sabotage or no sabotage, the best ginger snap recipe made it to the oven.