by Olivia Garrett, entertainment editor

When I was little, my granny would bake these delicious gingersnap cookies every time we visited. They were so good, that I, a normally timid and rule-abiding child, would not hesitate to sneak my hand into the cookie jar whenever the adults turned their backs. In hindsight, they probably knew that I was doing this because I possess nowhere near the amount of stealth necessary to pull that off. Anyways, these cookies were the highlight of every trip to Granny’s house. (That, and, of course,the joy of seeing my family…).

I, having now reached the almost-adult-y age of 17, have decided that it’s high time I learned how to bake. Determined to succeed, I dug through the family recipe “book”. This collection of recipes is really more like a pile of loose papers, of which many appear to have been written on a type-writer, than anything even remotely resembling a book. I valiantly searched through the jumbled mess, coming across recipes such as the one labeled “Not-Eatable” (???) and another that, though incomplete, had the helpful instructions to “call one of the aunts for directions” scrawled on the bottom. Triumphantly, I discovered “Granny’s Gingersnaps” towards the bottom of the stack.

Here, I ran into my first challenge — the hand-written instructions were illegible. (Small exaggeration…I struggled on one word…). In itself, the recipe was actually quite simple. Predictably, despite the apparent simplicity of the task, I managed to screw it up. I somehow did the steps in the wrong order and also managed to put not quite the right amount of sugar into the dough.

As I took the cookies out of the oven, I feared that this would be the last time I tried to bake unsupervised. Two years ago, I attempted a similarly “easy” chocolate chip cookie recipe and produced an end product that was not only the wrong taste, but also a suspiciously weird texture. Although this time my cookies had a fairly normal texture, the taste was, once again, off. (This probably had something to do with me measuring the sugar wrong.) Though not quite as sweet as they could have been, all and all, my cookies were surprisingly okay, and at least they looked nice.

Here’s the recipe, if you want to attempt it yourself.

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1 tbsp ground ginger
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 unbeaten egg,
1/4 cup molasses

Directions:

 1. Mix flour, ginger, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Cream shortening until soft in a separate bowl.
2. Add sugar to shortening gradually, creaming with each addition of sugar. Beat in egg and molasses to shortening/sugar.
3. Add dry mixture and blend well. Form dough into balls and roll in sugar.
4. Place balls 2″ apart on un-greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees until the tops are slightly rounded and cracked.
5. Leave for 3-5 minutes on cookie sheet before placing the cookies on a drying rack. If not eating immediately, cover once cool so that the cookies do not harden.