Friday a girlfriend and I spent 6+ hours making cookies. Chewy Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip, Sugar, Snickerdoodles, Chocolate Chip and Gingerbread Men 10 dough’s in total. We baked several dozen but find it is so much easier to freeze the dough’s in tube form and take them out as needed. Not all cookies can be frozen so we do tend to pick the ones we can. It helps to get them all done before the holidays; time is super tight this time of year. We do still need to get together so we can roll and cut out the sugar cookies; the discs are still sitting in my fridge.

We did the same thing last year and the gingerbread men were by far everyone’s favorite. So this year we thought we would make 2 double batches; thankfully we were only able to make 3 batches because I didn’t have enough molasses; by the time we were done cutting and baking them; we had over 80 of them.  By the time the last batch was rolled out and cut, we were extremely tired and a quite silly. Someone, and she will remain nameless, came up with a great idea. “We should have had some fund with some of these” yup we made a few anatomically kind of correct but not really gingerbread men/women. It was all in good fun and we laughed so hard it was difficult to not burn ourselves putting them in the oven.

My guys came home from work and we showed them our army of gingerbread. No lie they had a discussion about how we didn’t have enough for an army it was more like a platoon.  REALLY – it sure felt like an army to us.

Gingerbread Cookies

3 cups AP flour

¾ Cup packed brown sugar

¾ tsp baking soda

1 TBS ground cinnamon

1 TBS ground ginger

½ tsp ground cloves

½ tsp salt

12 TBS unsalted butter – softened but still cool, cut into 12 pieces

¾ Cup molasses

2 TBS milk

In an electric mixer; using the paddle, stir together the flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and salt at low speed until combined.  Stop the mixer add the butter pieces; mix at medium-low speed until the mixture resembles fine meal; a couple of minutes. Reduce speed to low and gradually add the molasses and milk. Mix until the dough us evenly moistened. Increase speed to medium and mix until thoroughly combined, about 10 seconds.

Scrape the dough onto a work surface; divide it in half. Working with one portion at a time, roll to ¼ inch thick between 2 large sheets if parchment paper. Leaving the dough sandwiched between the parchment, stack on a baking sheet and freeze until firm. Roughly 15-20 minutes.

Adjust oven racks to upper and lower middle positions, preheat 350’ line baking sheet s with either parchment or silipat mats.  Work with 1 dough at a time; peel away the parchment and set it aside, you can reuse it to roll out the scraps.  Cut and place on the sheet about ¾” apart. Bake cookies until the center of the cookies when touched barely retains an imprint. 8-11 minutes. Do not over bake.  Cool on the sheet for a couple of minutes then transfer to a wire rack. They freeze well and taste wonderful with ice cream.

My husband used to get us a coffee cup of coffee ice cream and a gingerbread cookie – Delish!!!