Butterscotch Gingerbread Cookies Recipe {Merry Christmas} (2024)

FAQs

What happens if you don't chill gingerbread dough? ›

Chilling the dough before it goes into a hot oven gives the butter a chance to firm up and reduces how much it spreads when baking. “You should chill the dough both before rolling and cutting and after,” she said.

You have a few things that can go wrong: The oven isn't hot enough. (it needs to set the top before the middle's fully risen) Not enough leavening (it needs to be strong enough to crack the top once it's set)

Key Ingredients in Gingerbread Cookies

Because of the added sticky sweetener (molasses), I add a little more flour to help soak it all up. Just like when we are making pinwheel cookies, a bit of extra flour helps the cookies can keep their shape.

Step 3: Turn the mixture out onto some cling film and pat into a flat ball, wrap tightly and chill for 30 minutes then place in the freezer until you are ready to use it. You can keep unbaked biscuit/cookie dough in your fridge for up to 3 days before baking or freeze for a month.

Divide the dough into two thick disks and wrap each disk in plastic wrap. Refrigerate until chilled, about 3 hours. (The dough can be prepared up to 2 days ahead.) To roll out the cookies, work with one disk at a time, keeping the other disk refrigerated.

Should gingerbread cookies be hard or soft? Soft gingerbread biscuits are ideal. They ought to be flexible. However, they should still be somewhat elastic, and if you hold them too firmly because you're so excited to eat them, you might even be able to leave your fingerprints on the cookie!

Not enough liquid

There are a few things you can do if your cookie dough is too dry and crumbly. First, try adding more liquid to the dough. This could be milk, water, or even just additional eggs. If that doesn't work, you could also try melting some butter and adding it to the dough.

Factor in two days when making the gingerbread dough as it needs to chill overnight. To get ahead though, the dough can be made up to two weeks in advance and kept in the fridge, just remember to take it out of the fridge half an hour or so before rolling out!

An excessive amount of butter makes it where the flour is unable to absorb the combined fat, which causes the cookie to spread too widely and the sugar to carbonize more easily because it's surrounded by too buttery a dough.

The deep, caramel-like sweetness of molasses pairs perfectly with the warm spices of ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, creating the iconic flavor profile of these classic treats. The choice of molasses over other sweeteners adds a depth and complexity that elevates gingerbread to a cherished holiday tradition.

What happens if you add too much molasses to cookies? ›

Doubling up on molasses softened the cookies significantly.

Molasses is also extremely dark in color, so this batch of cookies turned out to be a deep brown.

Golden Syrup

With its golden, amber color, it is lighter than molasses, though the two are similar in their thickness. Golden syrup also a liquid sweetener, so 1 cup of golden syrup can replace 1 cup of molasses. Golden syrup has a unique flavor, so it may alter the flavor of your recipe slightly.

Use a silicone baking mat or parchment paper. Coating your baking sheet with nonstick spray or butter creates an overly greasy foundation, causing the cookies to spread. I always recommend a silicone baking mat because they grip onto the bottom of your cookie dough, preventing the cookies from spreading too much.

Unless the dough is so firm it becomes brittle, refrigeration will make the dough less fragile in most cases.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies.

It can depend on the type of cookie dough, but for the most part, chilling the dough makes it keep its form, and if it has butter in it, prevents the butter from melting. If you don't chill the dough, it will be much softer and not keep its shape as well, both before and during baking.

To make sticky gingerbread dough easier to work with, chill it for at least 1 hour before rolling it out. Roll out the dough on a surface that's lightly dusted with flour or a mixture of flour and confectioners' sugar (aka powdered sugar).