Chewy ginger molasses cookies with 3 variations: triple ginger, chocolate, and citrus sugar. These are everything you want in a holiday cookie - or three! Get the gluten-free variation here



I have a bit of a problem making decisions sometimes, and have spent many hours agonizing over things like restaurant menus, socks, and especially recipes. Today I wanted to make triple ginger molasses cookies, but couldn't decide whether to make them classic, with chocolate chunks melting inside them, or dredged in orange sugar. So I divided the dough into thirds and made all three. Sometimes being indecisive pays off.

I was the most wary of the chocolate ones, but they turned out to be my favorite, especially soft, gooey and warm from the oven. The bitterness of the 70% chocolate enhances the deep richness of the molasses, all blending together with the various types of ginger.

Jay prefered the orange ones, and they do have a palette-pleasing zing to them.

But the classic ones are by no means dull, flecked and spicy with candied, ground and freshly grated gingers. They all make the house smell gorgeous as they bake.

I'm not a kitchen gadget person, but there are some tools that I sorely miss when I am without them. One is the spring loaded ice cream scoop. They come in handy for various purposes including portioning out drop cookie and scone dough, muffins, and cupcakes. I have a few different sizes ranging from small baby truffle to big daddy scone, and employ them all fairly regularly. They come in color coded handles; for modest-sized cookies, such as these, I use the purple one; for big, bakery sized cookies I use the red one.

Another tool is the plastic bench scraper. They cost about a dollar, so there's really no excuse not to have one. Stiffer and sturdier than a rubber spatula, they make scraping and mixing stiff doughs a breeze. Plus the lack of a handle means you usually get a lot of batter on your fingers, and who could blame you for licking it off?

The third and dearest to my heart is my little electronic scale, useful for weighing ingredients which are a drag to try to squish into a cup and then get back out, such as peanut butter, coconut oil, maple syrup or molasses. Instead, you can blithely just weigh everything into a bowl or two as you need them, thinking smugly how clever you are.

A fourth necessity is parchment paper. I despise those little rolls you often find in grocery stores and even cooking stores that should be more enlightened than that. It is always the wrong width, and annoying to cut each time you need a piece. You can order real, full-sized sheets here , or a friendly neighborhood bakery might sell you some if you ask nicely.