Molasses Cookies: or, More amazing recipes from instruction manuals!

Once again, we are borrowing recipes from people selling kitchen toys on Ebay.

Molasses-Spice Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup sugar ¼ tsp salt ¼ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp allspice ¼ tsp mace ¼ tsp cloves ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp ginger 1 egg ¼ cup molasses 2½ cups flour Heat oven to 375° Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening. Add sugar, salt, baking soda, and spices, cream well. Thoroughly mix in the egg, then the molasses. Beat until light and well-whipped. Gently mix in all but a quarter-cup of flour. Dough should be firm like modelling clay, and not at all sticky. Add the remaining flour (and possibly a bit more) if needed. Put through a cookie press onto the (ungreased!) baking sheet. Bake 8-12 minutes, or until slightly darkened at the edges. Immediately after you take the cookies out of the oven, use the spatula to remove them to a cooling rack. If you don't have a cookie press, you can shape the dough any way you like. You can use a rolling pin and cookie cutter. Or, you can roll the dough into little balls and flatten them between your hands. Or, you can use a cookie stamp if you have one. Or, you can roll the dough into little snakes and form them into whatever shapes you like (rings, pretzels, spirals, stars, etc). Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

I have been looking for new recipes to put through my squirt gun. Even though we had one really good recipe fall out of a box while we were pruning clutter, you can't always count on cookies to find you. I found someone selling an older cookie press online. They had photographed the entire instruction sheet to prove that it was intact. This included the suggested recipes. Naturally, I saved the images and then hastily closed the page before I could be tempted to buy it.

Today's recipe was perfect for me. It involves excessive amounts of molasses and our new cookie caulking gun. I could hardly wait to bring the stand mixer into this too.

I don't know if the cookies need this kind of excessive whipping. or if I just like playing with electric mixers. But the well-whipped cookies came out great the first time, and now I'm afraid to try any other way.

And now we get to the most exciting part of this recipe: pouring in a lot of molasses. I love any excuse to use excessive molasses, up to and including pouring it all over waffles. And just look at those beautiful brown swirls!

The molasses tinted the dough to a light honey color rather than the dark brown I hoped for. I began to suspect that the recipe writers had restrained themselves to a polite amount of molasses in some misguided pursuit of moderation and good taste.

If we look away from the recipe and read the general directions at the top of the sheet, we are told to set aside some of the flour (say, a spoonful or two) when mixing it in. In their own words, "Due to variations in flour and the size of eggs it sometimes becomes necessary to omit some of the flour or to add an additional one or two tablespoons."

I really like that they wrote this. A lot of people (including my past self) think you merely get your measurements right and all comes out perfect. This is annoyingly common among those smarmy men who upload baking videos that involve a whiteboard covered in math and mansplaining. But in reality, even the most regimented industrial bakeries must vary their formulas from one batch to the next. If the people in the Twinkie factory have to tweak the recipe from day to day, so do the rest of us.

The flour darkened the cookie dough to a more acceptable color. It may not show in the pictures, but just take my word for it because my phone hates the kitchen lights for some reason. I will always be surprised when white flour (of all things!) adds a brownish tint to recipes.

And so, it was time to load up our dough contraption and start squirting! 

On a recipe group I'm in, somebody said that it's easier to use one of these dough presses if you don't grease the baking sheet. This sounded like blasphemy, sacrilege, and heresy to me. It also meant I would actually have to wash the pans. But when I've use paper (ungreased or not), only half of the cookies only stayed where I tried to put them. I've been getting a little tired of dropping cookie misfires back into the mixing bowl.

I haven't baked cookies without paper or foil under them for multiple years. After scraping far too many stuck-on cookies off of bare pans, I swore never do that to myself again. But I was personally reassured that if I use a thin metal spatula to promptly get the cookies onto a cooking rack upon removing them from the oven, they will not stick. I found it reassuring to have a specific person to blame when my cookies inevitably glued themselves to the pan and required a chiseling job.

But even though other people and the instruction sheet told me not to grease the pan, I didn't believe them. Instead, I reconciled myself to sacrificing the first batch of cookies after they almost certainly fused themselves the pan. After making peace with impending failure, I decided to play with all the little stencils. I've been steadily making my way through all the designs that came with the cookie gun. This one really raised my curiosity. I couldn't begin to imagine the cookie it would produce.

At first, I merely got spaghetti-like extrusions. They flopped about uselessly when I lifted the press away from the pan.

I don't know what to do when these things don't work. Our cookie press doesn't have any adjustment knobs to tweak when cookies don't come out right. It only has one lever on top that pushes the dough out. When I did get a cookie out of that stencil, it looked, um, like this.

I don't think I will reuse this one in the future.

While the first batch baked, I pressed out the second. The raised sides of this pan gave me pause. They promised to make it difficult to get a spatula in there at a flat angle. But putting those worries aside, we did find out that the star tip makes really cute cookies.

The recipe says to bake 10-12 minutes, but mine were done in about seven. I suspect that different cookie guns dispense different-sized cookies which need different baking times. Maybe this recipe handout was originally boxed with a cookie press that makes big cookies.

After the first batch was ready, I got out the metal spatula and was pleasantly surprised-- amazed, even-- at how easily the cookies lifted right off. Incidentally, it felt weird to use this spatula indoors. We only ever use it for grilling, hence the permanent burns.

The plain round cookies are the misshapen ones. I got tired of putting the dough back in the press, so I reshaped them with my hands instead.

Getting the cookies immediately off the pan had an unexpected upside. It didn't matter if the smaller cookies were done while the bigger cookies were still raw. You could remove some of the cookies as needed and let the others resume baking. The half-baked ones didn't have time to cool off before returning to the oven.

Here are our cookies on the cooling rack, with the astonishingly clean pan behind them. 

Most of the cookie shapes came out rather nice. However, the ones from the irksome stencil looked malformed at best. A passing person, lured by the kitchen smells, said "It looks like a cosmic horror of boobs." The weird cookies even made our six-petal flowers look bad by association. 

Setting aside the cookies that unfortunately came out just like they're supposed to, I will have to get a bigger rack if I make spritz cookies a lot. I only bought this one for baking fish sticks in the toaster oven. I never thought that a small cookie press would require paraphernalia and threaten to take over all the storage space in the kitchen.

I have to give our friends at the Mirro recipe development department a tip of the hat and a lot of credit. These cookies were absolutely fantastic. This is the best recipe I've gotten out of an appliance manual since the coffee cheesecake. One person said "These taste professional!" I meant to find out if the spices get stronger the next day (as often happens with gingerbread and related things), but the cookies were all gone by the end of the night.