Why so snappy?

Since I recently discovered my affinity for gingersnap cookies, I sought to make them for myself. I haven't baked in a really long time and never have I ever used molasses before. Looking through a couple different recipes, the biggest discrepancy I saw was whether to use ground ginger or freshly grated ginger. So I found 2 different recipes that were seemingly similar and made half batches of each. The recipe using fresh ginger involved less butter and the recipe using ground ginger involved more spices (one of which I didn't even have).

left--fresh ginger, right--ground ginger

 To say the least, the resulting cookies could not be more different! Taste-wise, the fresh ginger cookie is more moist and has nice kick to it. It is also sweeter. The ground ginger cookie is much spicier. Also I am assuming that the added moisture from the fresh ginger made the batter a lot softer and that led to the cookies flattening out a lot more than the ground ginger ones. There wasn't too much different about the wet ingredients between the 2 recipes other than the fresh ginger one involving 2 tbsp less butter. Is that really enough to affect the texture of the cookie? The other difference was the timing of adding the spices, one added it into the dry mixture and the other added it to the wet.

Before mixing the dry & wet ingredients together: left is ground ginger (hehe you can see the spices in sifted flour), right is fresh ginger

ground ginger cookie dough

fresh ginger cookie dough -- so soft I had to refrigerate it for about 2 hours before I could roll it into balls

Before & After on the cookie sheet

On my makeshift cooling rack (which is just one of our extra oven racks haha) -- I really should invest in a cookie dough scoop so my cookies are more uniform in size. I tend to get impatient by the end and start rolling larger balls of dough to get through with it!

By the time these finished, the sun had set, so the lighting of this photo is artificial.
Also, notice the blobs these cookies turned out as. I did not foresee them to flatten and spread out as much as they did since the last batch had no problems of that kind.

 The conclusion is that I think that I prefer the fresh ginger one for its texture and in future creations I'm going to try a combination of fresh and ground ginger to envelope all these layers of flavor into the cookie. Up next.. pumpkin snickerdoodles anybody?


-J