every recipe I have ever tried has been wonderful.

Lately a ginger snap recipe came thru and since I had some around,

I finely diced some candied ginger and added it to the batter.

Then I poked a dark chocolate covered ginger candy into each one – voila, delish!

Those are moonflower vine seed pods in the basket

So, anyway,  here’s my take on their recipe

Gingersnaps – makes about sixty cookies

For the cookie dough

3/4 cup vegetable shortening*

1 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 large egg

1/3 cup molasses

2 1/3 cups unbleached all purpose flour

1 to 2 teaspoons ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

3/4 cup finely diced crystallized ginger

about 60 small pieces of dark chocolate covered candied ginger

For the coating

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Beat together the shortening, sugar, salt, and baking soda.

Beat in the egg, then the molasses.

Add the flour and spices, beating to make a smooth, fairly stiff dough.

Stir in the finely diced candied ginger

To make the coating, combine the sugar and cinnamon, and place in a shallow pan or dish.

Drop the dough in 1″ balls into the cinnamon-sugar mixture.

Roll the balls in the sugar to coat, then transfer them to the prepared baking sheets,

leaving at least 1-1/2″ between them.

Poke a chocolate covered candy into each cookie.

Bake the cookies for 11 minutes, for cookies that are crisp around the edges, and “bendy” in the center.

Bake for 13 minutes, for cookies that are crisp/crunchy all the way through.

(I baked for 8 minutes then rotated the pan and baked for 7 more minutes.)

Cooling on the back porch

Remove the cookies from the oven, and cool right on the pan, or on a rack.

Cool completely, then store tightly wrapped, at room temperature.

If these freeze well, they get baked and added to my holiday tins.

I only baked 24 and rolled and stuffed the remaining batter and put the balls on waxed paper on a cookie sheet in the freezer and will bag them when they are hard.  I’ll have to get back to you on how the chocolate holds up!

Moon Flower

Here is a photo of one of this summer’s moonflowers -(remember the seed pods in the basket above?  Nothing works better to pretty up a chain link fence! And the hummingbirds love the flowers.  But, then again, it was a lot of work today to cut those vines away.  I think I’ll plan on something else next year, maybe something I find in the spring at the Walter Knoll Florist garden center!

Got your holiday shopping started?  We’ve got our holiday features up!  Gifts from Walter Knoll are great for corporate gift giving! Check out our poinsettias – better than anything you’ll get at the big box hardware stores!  We also have any size gourmet gift basket you could want!

And then there is the moonflower vine. I bought seeds one year thinking they were the moonflowers like I got from Uncle Ed and Aunt Verna, but they turned out to be a vine that grew all the way up to the second floor deck and beyond! I think they’d have covered the roof if I had let them have their way! Heart shaped leaves bigger than dinner plates! It’s amazing what a little miracle grow will do.

And finally, here’s a little moon flower arrangement I made using a flower frog, it didn’t last long, but it was beautiful and did I mention how fragrant the moon flowers are at night?