Sibling Cutlery

We just got home from picking Garrick up from the airport, and you know you’re in Northern Michigan when there’s a bear in your airport. Michigan chose to welcome Garrick back in style with extremely icy roads, freezing rain, and a long, slippery ride home. But we made it, and Garrick’s sure not in Phoenix anymore.

Now that Garrick’s home safe, we can continue the madness, and my next recipe is gingerbread sandwich cookies. I absolutely love ginger cookies, and these are definitely good ones. The original recipe called for buttercream in the middle, but I decided to make a cream cheese frosting instead. It was the right thing to do. They look like oatmeal cream pies, but trust me, they’re even better. They’re soft in the middle, crisp on the outside, and perfectly spicy.

Your cookie ingredients:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Combine flour, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, and salt in a bowl.

Beat together the butter and sugar in an electric mixer until fluffy.

Then add the egg and molasses. Try not to be disturbed by how weird the molasses smells. I usually spray the measuring cup with a bit of cooking spray before measuring the molasses so that it doesn’t take as long to come back out, because that expression about molasses in February is no joke.

Mix until well blended.

Slowly add the dry ingredients until evenly mixed.

Then bake for 10-15 minutes. Ten minutes was fine for mine. They puff up first, then fall again. Try not to faint when the fumes from these invade your house.

While the cookies cool, mix up some filling. Here are your ingredients:

Cream together the butter and cream cheese.

Then mix in the vanilla and add the powdered sugar in slowly. I used just under 2 cups because I don’t like it too sweet, but if the cookies weren’t so good, I could eat the whole bowl.

You can just spread the frosting on the cookies with a knife, but I think it’s much easier to pipe it on. I used my mom’s cake decorating kit, but a ziplock bag with the corner snipped off works just as well. Pipe the frosting most of the way out to the edge of one cookie…

then press another one on top so that the frosting oozes out to the edge.

Mmmmmmmmm. Now lock them all up in a pretty tin and put them in the big fridge outside before you eat all of them.

Ginger Cookies

from Tasty Kitchen

1 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

10 tablespoons butter, softened

3/4 cups sugar

1 egg

1/4 cup unsulfured molasses

In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, and salt. Cream together butter and sugar. Beat molasses and egg into butter mixture. Slowly mix in dry ingredients until well blended. Drop by tablespoons onto ungreased cookie sheets and bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes.

Cream Cheese Frosting

adapted from All Recipes

1 8 oz. package cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup butter

scant 2 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Cream together butter and cream cheese. Mix in vanilla and slowly add sugar.

Assembly:

When cookies have cooled, spread or pipe frosting onto the bottom of a cookie. Leave about 1/2″ to 1/4″ between the edge of the cookie and the frosting, if piping. Press another cookie on top of the frosting until it has spread to the edge of the bottom cookie.