What's Cooking At Dive's? Cookies!

Cookies! Yay!
These are Shaker Spice Cookies and they are more addictive than crack cocaine.

As we are cooking another dish from the US of A, we shall be working once again from a recipe (as US cooking is alien to me).
This time the recipe has been provided by my girlfriend's mom (yes, as you should all have guessed by now, my girl has a "mom" rather than a "mum").

Get your pinnies on and come join us in the kitchen.

Here are the ingredients we shall be using. Yay for molasses! I've never cooked with that before.
In fact I bake about as often as Halley's Comet comes around (mum is brilliant at baking so I never needed to learn), so sugar, flour, bicarb and … er … ready-ground spices are a novelty to me too.

In fact - so that I don't mess things up - I shall defer to one who knows these things well and let my lovely assistant do all the hard work in today's post, while I simply operate the camera and eat the cookies.

Here she is already hard at work.
Those pretty orange measuring cups and the cute green and white measuring spoons have come all the way from the US, as I didn't have any such beasts in my menagerie.
You know me … I never measure anything. The nearest handful or "sploosh" is close enough for the kind of one pot mess cookery I do, but for baking - so I am reliably informed - quantities should be exact or the whole thing ends in tears.

So anyhoo … You'll need two bowls to start this off.
In the first bowl, combine 2 cups of plain flour, 2 teaspoons of baking soda, half a teaspoon of crushed cloves (yay me for actually doing some work … I pounded the crap out of the cloves), half a teaspoon of ginger and one teaspoon of cinnamon.

Mix all that lot together with a fork until it's well blended.

Then comes the fun … molasses! Woohoo!
The word "gloop" comes to mind.

In the second bowl, we find two-thirds of a cup of sunflower oil, one cup of sugar, a quarter of a cup of molasses (yay) and an egg.

Stir all that around until it gets nice and messy …

… and then plop the flour mixture in on top of it.

This bit's fun. Make sure all of that stuff gets well blended into a great big, brown and sticky mess.

And this bit's even more fun!
Rolling little poo-balls between your hands. Yummy!
They need to be about yay big (I'm still rebelling against all of this precise measuring business).

Plop 'em on a buttered baking sheet kinda like this.

We put nine on the first sheet, though that turned out to be a bit crowded so we cut it down after that.

We also patted the tops down with a fork the first time around, but later we didn't bother and they came out even nicer.

Here's another gift from across the water: an oven thermometer.
I'd never needed one before but I am so glad my honeypie brought one over as it turns out my old oven runs too hot. You need to have it set at 350º, which is supposed to be gas mark 4, but it turns out that in my oven that is gas mark three and a third.

These little fellas want to be in there for ten minutes, but after five minutes you reach in and rotate the tray one-eighty degrees to make sure and get them evenly cooked.

And here they are!
Utterly delicious (Phil will vouch for that), cinnamon-and-gingery Shaker Spiced Cookies!
These are completely different to what we in England know as biscuits. Our biscuits are hard and brittle and crunchy, but these US cookies are weirdly soft inside and firm on the outside.

And AMAZING fresh out of the oven!

So … After fifty years, I get to eat my first real cookie! And believe me, they are glorious. I made another batch last weekend and stuck most of them in the freezer for treats.

Enjoy!

This, by the way, is just to clear up any confusion amongst those Johnny Foreigners who asked what a "pinny" is. It is short for "pinafore", and comes in a range of fetching designs, from pictures of asparagus to Soviet slogans.

Your models today are Katie and Dive.