East & West, in cookie-form

I did quite a bit of baking in Cheonan last week because my mom is starting to get into vegan baking and wanted to try out some recipes with me. We were like two mad scientists in the kitchen! :) And what did we bake? Cookies, cookies, and more cookies. I used to only ever make muffins, but I'm a total cookie monster these days~

Check out the greenery! I got the recipe for these green tea cookies from the '(never home)maker' blog, of which I'm a big fan. She recently made some 'Mapled Matcha-Sunflower Seedsters' which looked amazing. As soon as I saw her pics, I knew I had to try the recipe, especially since I've been wanting to put my Bosung Green Tea powder to good use. It's just been sitting in my pantry for the longest time, collecting dust.

The original recipe calls for maple syrup, but we just subbed it with brown rice syrup. Also, instead of having sunflower seeds mixed into the cookie dough, we only placed a few sunflower seeds on the top for decoration. In the end, ours were more like plain 'Green Tea Cookies,' but whatever you wanna call them, they were geeeuuud!

The obligatory cookie-stack photo.

Oh snap! And what's this, you ask? Our holiday cookie platter of green tea and ginger-molasses cookies! I've been obsessed with the ginger-molasses cookies I made last week and since then, I have baked them about 3 more times. They are the ultimate.

Boom.

Yet another cookie stack.

I know I promised to post the recipe for these Ginger Molasses Cookies, so here it is!

Soft Ginger Molasses Cookies

What you'll need:

250g cookie/pastry flour
100g sugar
1 1/2 Tbs ginger powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup dark molasses
1/4 cup oil
3Tbs water
1 Tbs fresh grated ginger

Method:

Preheat oven to 350F or 175C
Mix all the dry ingredients
Mix all the wet ingredients
Combine wet and dry and mix until everything is well incorporated. Your cookie dough should be at a consistency where you can roll balls in the palms of your hands, but not too dry either.
Roll balls of dough in between your palms and place on the cookie sheet. Gently flatten the balls with your fingers.
Sprinkle the tops with sugar and gently pat the sugar down slightly. This is optional~
Bake for about 10 minutes, or until golden brown. If you want a cookie that is more like a ginger snap cookie, bake for about 12 minutes total, but keep an eye on them!

Notes: The reason why my flour and sugar measurements are in grams, is because it helps me get more precise, consistent results each time. My apologies to those who don't have a food scale... Also, I've made these with half white sugar and half dark brown sugar which resulted in beautiful, darker, richer cookies. The sugar content is pretty high, so feel free to reduce the amount a bit. Or don't bother trying to be well-balanced and just embrace the sugar rush!

United colors of cookies.

Gotta taste each flavor~

We weren't about to hoard the vegan cookie love, so we packaged some of them up to share with neighbors.

How about some homemade cookies for a Christmas gift, made "just for you"!