Ginger Cookies and Winter Squash Soup

Greetings, all. I must apologize for the slight delay in getting a new post up. My nine-year old iMac only has internet access because my genius IT friends have jury rigged it to connect to my house’s wireless network. Unfortunately, every time the power is cut to my router (ie. if it comes unplugged or the power goes out) the internet becomes stubborn and requires a little coaxing to come back to life. Luckily, my wonderful friend Chris came and fixed it and was rewarded with cookies.

Since it’s fall I thought I should make use of some of the gorgeous squash that has been appearing in the produce section lately. Butternut squash soup is one of my all time favorites, and I decided it was high time I made it at home. I found a recipe for Winter Squash Soup and I was in business. The thing I liked most about this soup is that it’s not loaded with cream. The 1/4 cup of cream at the very end gives it just that little touch of richness it needs. I left out the sage because Mom is not a fan of sage, and if you ask her she will tell you how much she is not a fan of sage. I can’t tell you exactly what seasonings went into the soup (other than what the recipe calls for) because Eric and I were alternately manning the stove and adding things. I threw in some parsley and I know he added some pumpkin pie spice and a splash of vanilla. We definitely needed to do a fair amount of seasoning, but once we got it where we wanted it, I thought it was pretty damn good. You’ll notice I didn’t make the gruyere croutons the recipe includes, because we had some sandwiches with it instead.

I was pretty excited about dessert because this was my first chance to make a recipe from my recently purchased More From Magnolia. I’m a ginger fanatic, so my first Magnolia endeavor was naturally the Iced Ginger Cookies. The recipe calls for light molasses, which I’m telling you I could not find anywhere. Ultimately, I ended up using almost a full 1/4 cup of Lyle’s golden syrup (thank you, UK family!) and just a splash of regular molasses to finish it off. I don’t think the taste suffered at all, and to be perfectly honest I’m not that crazy about the taste of molasses anyway. For the icing, I used regular unsalted butter instead of shortening, and I doubled the recipe because it didn’t look like very much. The cookies did bake way faster than the recipe called for, and I had to knock the 12 minute baking time down to about 9 minutes. But lord, these are good! They’re nice and chewy, and the icing on top makes for a happy balance in sweetness- just don’t go overboard with it. I think next time -I’m definitely making these again- I’ll throw some crystallized ginger on top for a little extra oomph.

That’s all for this week, but keep an eye on the Twitter, because I think next weekend I’m going to have my very first kitchen guest. And we’re going to make enough desserts to induce diabetes just by reading about them. Cheers!