G is for Gingersnaps


 This is a plate of Auntie Ann's gingersnaps.

I mentioned her in my B for Bread post. Auntie Ann loves to bake. She sends home the most amazing care packages. On Christmas Eve, she passed me a giant parcel filled with muffins and squares, and a big bag of ginger cookies.

They are a perfect combination of crisp and chewy, sweet and spicy. I like them with a cup of tea. Bryan heats them up in the microwave so they have that just out of the oven taste. Lily nibbles them around the edges, or crumbles them in to applesauce. We dole them out a few at a time because they are SO good and we want them to last - we like to joke that they could be used as currency in our family.

I would love to have the recipe, but it's a hard one to get out of Auntie. She has about 5 recipes she likes to use, depending on her mood, what ingredients she has, or what color the molasses is. Then you have to factor in baking time and how distracted one might get while the cookies are in the oven.  9 minutes and they are too soft, 11 minutes and the cookies are too hard. That's subjective too, as my mom likes the crispy ones and Bryan likes the chewy ones. I asked to see Auntie's recipe book once. Was I in for a treat!

She has a drawer in her kitchen that is filled with old fashioned cut and paste scrapbooks. She collects recipes the same way my mom collects cookbooks - and this collection spans 70 years of cooking.The books are stained and dogeared, spattered with batter from cakes eaten long ago. Some of the recipes are cuttings from the newspaper, others are ones written in by Auntie. The earlier ones are written in a fine confident hand. As I flipped through the pages, the hand was a bit shakier, the words a bit bigger.

These days the recipes are in different hands, as we have written out our recipes for Auntie, and she has pasted them in. Her hands are not as reliable as they once were, and she has shaky days that don't allow her to bake. You see, this year my Auntie will be 94. She is my dad's aunt, my great Aunt, Lily's great great aunt and godmother. I count her as one of my grandparents and she is very dear to all of us.

My friend Keltie gave me a really neat notebook for Christmas. It's a Moleskine one, a recipe journal. Today I took advantage of the quiet morning to copy recipes from my own nearly full notebook to the new recipe journal. Maybe someday one of my nieces or nephews will look at the stained and dogeared pages and wonder how I came across all of them.

I'm hoping they will find her gingersnap recipes among the collection.

Project 365-7