My Great Grandma Anna was, by all accounts, one fierce woman. And I mean that in the most complimentary sense. She had to be, if she was going to raise my Grandfather.
Every year at Christmas she made Molasses cookies. The kind of Molasses cookies that three and now four generations later are still the stuff of legend. If ever Christmas acquired a taste, warm and sweet and full of aromatic spice and then somehow further managed to wrap that taste into a moist, chewy, sugar glittered package, well it would be something, wouldn't it? Your knees would go weak and your heart would melt just a little bit. And you'd want it to be Christmas all year long.
Well, such is the response after eating one of Grandma Anna's Molasses cookies. Christmas and all it's wonder comes to live in your mouth for just one short little moment. Or many short little moments if you proceed to keep shoveling them in. And one of the best things about them is whether fresh out of the oven and soft or a few weeks old and hard enough they need a good dunk in coffee or tea the taste is still the same. Yummy.
My cousin has become quite proficient at making them. My mom, too. As they were always a Holiday staple when I was growing up. Before going gluten free I made them regularly. And even after I gave up gluten I still made them for my Husband and E. They are quite possibly one of the best cookies to make with a small child. Because you are never too young (or old for that matter) to grab handfuls of chilled dough and roll them into a shape somewhat resembling a ball and coat the whole thing in white sugar. Oh the deliciously darkly sticky and crunchy fingers that result.
But now that E is gluten free it would be just plain mean to whip up a batch she couldn't eat. Or lick off her fingers. Plus the recipe, dog-eared and stained and liberally colored with red crayon so you know it's a favorite, contains 3/4 of a cup of Crisco shortening. I know, I know, they're meant to be Holiday treats, not an everyday staple. But with all that we now know about Trans fats, I really can't bring myself to buy a canister let alone bake with it.
Believe me when I say I have tried just about every substitution. And forget the gluten, I'm talking about the shortening. Coconut oil, Butter, Palm shortening. And the results are never the same. Actually, in the case of the coconut oil, the results were epically disastrous. Like so epically disastrous they are now a phrase of description. "As bad as the time I made the Molasses cookies with coconut oil."
If fundamentally speaking there remains no good substitute for the fat content of the cookie, the other experimenting I did, while interesting, remains in the end inconsequential. Pre-made Gluten free flour mix, my own mix, Unsulphured Molasses, Blackstrap Molasses, Sorghum, it makes little difference. Without the shortening we are nowhere. (Though, my mom and uncle have mentioned that using Sorghum makes a cookie that tastes a lot like the kind Grandma Anna made. Not the kind her recipe makes. But she, herself. Back in the day when though they used shortening and thought nothing of it, their Molasses wasn't so highly refined and tampered with and therefore had a lot more flavor.)
This year I just Googled a new gluten free Molasses cookie recipe and made that. It was not the same, of course. I didn't expect it to be. But it wasn't any less pain free than my mad experimenting either. The cookies spread everywhere. The dough stuck to everything. My wonderfully quirky gas oven kept jacking the temp up by 150 degrees. Randomly and for fun, it seems. So using a timer was pointless. Finally, remembering that Grandma Anna's recipe called for chilled dough I stuck the whole bowl in the freezer and believe it or not that made a huge difference. That and adding more Tapioca starch and making the cookiedough balls the size of marbles. So they were small enough to puff up and be cooked through at the same time and yet not burned on the bottom. Good grief! Shortening might kill you and gluten, make you sick, but they sure allow for a more pleasant baking experience.
There is a message of hope and a silver lining of the end of this whole thing, though. I found a Paleo cookie recipe that is remarkably similar to what Grandma Anna used to make. At least I think so. And it doesn't contain gluten or butter or coconut oil or shortening. And it wasn't too complicated to make. No disasters. Plain or epic. I did modify it, of course. I had long since hit the wall of Christmas cookie overload. That happened somewhere around my 15th batch of the gluten free Molasses cookies. When I tried to put an unbaked tray into the dishwasher. I had to make the cookies so small the whole process took FOREVER. And I was so over it as to think "why not bake something else...?" Yeah. Delusional, in other words.
So I did. I made more cookies. I didn't use Molasses. (As it is usually sugar cane based and anything sugar cane based gives me migraines. And unlike the other cookies I made, I wanted to eat these.) I used Maple syrup instead. I also just added additional ground ginger in place of the fresh (a taste test told me when I had the right amount) and I used my standard flax eggs in place of the regular eggs. Other than that though, I kept it the same. And by that I mean simple. Refreshingly simple. I'd like to think that Grandma Anna, fierce, no nonsense, mother and grandmother that she was wouldn't balk the least bit at my Paleo take on the tradition she started. And she'd be happy the legend lives on.
