Saturday, January 11, 2014

Experiment 17: Pumpkin Gingersnaps

Figure 1.  Pumpkin gingersnap cookies, cracked on top, with a coat of sugar on the surface.
November 2013

Introduction

Well, we're nearing the end of pumpkin season.  Times like these demand that we devise a use for every last bit of canned pumpkin before it is deemed “so last season.”  In an effort to combine our proclivity for making sugary desserts and our desire to absolve our aforementioned pumpkin dilemma, we chose to bake chewy pumpkin gingersnap cookies.  This recipe is super fantastic because it's chewy, unlike most gingersnaps, which are so crunchy they could crack your teeth.  Spoiler alert: Fantastic recipe, definitely try this one at home!

NFPA Ratings
Figure 2. Our NFPA ratings for pumpkin gingersnap cookies.

Difficulty: One point for mixing, one point for rolling.  Just remember to mix your dough before your roll, or else you'll have a big mess on your hands and your floor...especially over carpet.

Baking Time:  If you could fit all of your cookies in the oven, this recipe would take you about 30 minutes to complete.  However, if you are like us and only have one baking sheet or have an apartment-sized oven, you'll have to build more time into your schedule for rotating your cookies in and out of the oven.  The good news is that if you run out of time, you can stuff the extra cookie dough in the refrigerator until you have time to make more cookies.
 

Course:  Dessert, of course!  Not a bad midnight snack either.  And breakfast, if you're not to strict on that whole "balanced breakfast" thing.

Materials
Figure 3. Dry ingredients.  Wet ingredients not shown
due to gross aesthetics.
0.5 cups butter at 22º C (room temperature)
1 cup granulated sugar (+ more in a small bowl to the side for rolling onto the dough)
0.5 cup pure pumpkin
0.25 cup molasses
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
2.33 cup all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1.5 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cloves
0.5 tsp salt

Methods

1) Preheat oven to 350º F.  In a bowl or stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar together until smooth
2) Add the pumpkin, egg, molasses, and vanilla extract and mix until...you know...mixed
3) In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, spices, and salt
Figure 4. Raw dough
4) Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix
5) Refrigerate for at least an hour but no more than 3 days (Who leaves cookie dough in the fridge for 3 whole days??)
6) Line baking sheet with parchment paper.  Bring back the little bowl of sugar that you placed off to the side earlier.
7) Roll tbsp-sized balls of dough in the sugar and place onto the baking sheet, about 2 inches apart
8) Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the cookies look crackled and set on the edges
9) Let the cookies cool for 2-3 minutes after you take them out of the oven (they will still be soft).  Then, transfer them to a wire rack to cool them completely.

Makes A LOT (30-36) of cookies.


Results
Figure 5. The finished product
These cookies were scrumptious. (n > 35...so tasty) They were sweet but not too sweet, they were pumpkiny but not too pumpkiny.  You could taste the bite of the cloves and the tartness of the ginger.  Every ingredient showed through and hit its mark.  We surprised ourselves and others with the quality of the taste.  In addition, they looked amazing.  It is all too common that a finished baking product does not look like the pictures, but this time, our cookies looked like they came straight out of the blog that had the original recipe.  Super easy, super delicious.  So good we made a second batch.

These cookies were also very soft.  Straight out of the oven, they did not seem fully cooked; however, they finished cooking on their own, and they remained soft and chewy.  

Discussion
Molasses.  It is sold next to syrup at the grocery store, it's brown like syrup, it's thick like syrup...but it does not smell or taste as sweet as syrup.  (Trust us on this.  Please do not dip your finger in to taste molasses by itself.)  What exactly is this unusual pseudo-syrup?  Our initial hypothesis, given its proximity to maple syrup in its consistency, color, and geographical location, was that molasses fell somewhere in the liquid plant product spectrum between maple syrup and tree sap.

Figure 6. Jar of Molasses
(photo credit: somewhere on google.com)
But we were wrong.  Unlike syrup, in the cooking ingredient family tree, molasses is not related to tree sap.  Did the grocery store mis-categorize molasses, or were we tricked?  That's a question for a different blog.

Let's chat about the etiology of molasses.  For the sake of analogy, molasses is to sugar as whey is to curds.  That is, molasses is the byproduct of the sugar-making process.  To purify sugar from sugarcane, the cane is chopped up and mashed, and the leftover sugary juice is boiled multiple times.  Boiling promotes the crystallization of sugar, which is extracted from the mixture.  The leftover juice from each boil is sold as its own product - molasses.  Light molasses, the byproduct of the first boiling, is sweet but does not have a very complex flavor.  This is what we used.  Robust molasses, the byproduct of the second boiling, has a rich flavor and is moderately sweet.  Blackstrap, the leftover syrup from the third boiling, has the lowest sugar content but the richest flavor.  Light molasses is sometimes "sulphured" to preserve it and add flavor, but this is not what you want...really ever.



Figure 7. Molasses on a Spoon
(photo credit: google.com)
Why is molasses used in baking?  Sure, molasses is healthy (it’s fat-free and full of B vitamins, iron, calcium, magnesium, and potassium), but that’s not its purpose in desserts.   Molasses has a rich, complex flavor that arises from its low sugar content.  This flavor lends itself to the rich flavor of everything from gingerbread cookies to barbecue sauce.

Interestingly, molasses is also used as the base for making rum (instead of, for example, hops for beer), and it is added to garden soil to promote microbial growth.

References
Figure 6.  YUM.  YUM YUM YUM!!

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