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Sunday, January 2, 2011

Molasses Gingersnaps


If you love ginger, these are the cookies for you. After seeing these cookies on The Daily Dietribe and these cookies on Andrea's easy vegan cooking, I was in the mood to make some spicy, gluten free, vegan cookies with a molasses finish. Teff is a very versatile flour that I have used heavily in the past few months. It has molasses undertones, so although there isn't very much molasses in this recipe, it does come through.

Molasses Gingersnaps
yield: 1 dozen good sized cookies
3 oz White Rice Flour
5 oz Teff Flour
1 oz Arrowroot Powder
1/2 cup vegan Sugar
3/4 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1 Tb ground Chia Seeds
1 tsp powdered Ginger
1/2 tsp Allspice
2 oz finely minced Crystalized Ginger*
2.4 oz Sulfur Free Molasses
4.5 oz Sunflower Oil
2-4 Tb Turbinado Sugar

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F. Combine all of the dry ingredients thoroughly, then add the minced crystalized ginger and stir so it is distributed evenly. Add the molasses and sunflower oil. This is a dryish batter (it won't be a big cohesive chunk of dough; it will clump together in separate large clumps). You will need to handle and press the cookies together a bit. It shouldn't be hard to get the cookies to take a cookie shape on the cookie sheet. Press a little bit of turbinado sugar onto the top of the cookies and then bake for 12 minutes.

*A lot of crystalized ginger is treated with Citric Acid or sulfur dioxide to keep a light yellow color. The problem with this is that Citric Acid is made from corn and sulfur dioxide is a preservative otherwise known as "E220" and the precurser to sulfuric acid. I was able to find some crystalized ginger that was a darker brown that only contained ginger and evaporated cane juice in the bulk section of my health food grocery store.

To see what treated ginger looks like, click here.

To see what untreated ginger looks like, click here.

5 comments:

  1. I remember you said you were going to de-glutenize the ginger cookies. The ones I have are made with spelt flour, which has gluten. I've got a new bag of teff, and of rice flour, and everything else. The thing I don't have is a scale!

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  2. I might be able to help :) 1 TB is about .5 oz for liquids. So it'd be 9 TB of sunflower oil (around 1/2 cup + TB) and molasses is heavy so only 4 TB of molasses. The crystalized ginger is 1/4 cup compressed or 1/3 cup loose.

    Flours are usually 5.5 oz per cup so you can probably count on 1 c Teff, 2/3 c white rice, and 3 TB of arrowroot, which can be substituted for equal parts potato starch or tapioca flour.

    I use the scale because it's so much easier to reproduce the same textures. I bought a cheap $8 Escali digital scale, and I love it. I was so tired of creating tasty stuff and never being able to replicate it.

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  3. I could have used this a few weeks ago. I tried to make some ginger cookies for my family and had a few false starts while adjusting the recipe to GF. Next time I will use this for sure!

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  4. I made a version yesterday with palm oil and less ginger, but it just wasn't gingery enough, so today I amped it up and switched oils. I like the outcome. They aren't as malleable as the version with palm oil, but my family like the flavor. Except grandma. Everything is too spicy :)

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  5. Thanks for the conversions and the scale recommendation!

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