This chewy ginger molasses cookies recipe is easy to make and creates soft cookies with a hint of five-spice and vanilla flavor. They are fantastic on their own, and absolutely to die for when paired up with ice cream and made into an ice cream sandwich!

Flat and chewy. Those are my only two requirements for a good cookie. If it has crispy edges it's a bonus (a really big bonus) but for this cookie recipe, we won't be trying to get the crispy edges because to me, ginger molasses cookies are meant to be soft and chewy and crazy comforting and they are definitely not limited to just Christmas time 😉

INGREDIENTS FOR GINGER MOLASSES COOKIES

Molasses - Use fancy molasses and not blackstrap molasses for this recipe. Fancy molasses is higher in sugar so it tastes sweeter - blackstrap molasses has a bitter undertone to it. Fancy molasses is also a lot runnier and easier to work with, whereas blackstrap molasses is very thick and harder to mix into the flour.
Five-Spice - For this recipe, I like to use Chinese five-spice, but you can use any kind that you can find. Make sure not to buy allspice, it is a very different flavor and spice.

THE GINGER MOLASSES COOKIE DOUGH

Whenever I make these ginger molasses cookies, I like to cream the butter to death. I find that adding the extra air really helps the cookie rise, which then drops the cookie to a thinner cookie once it deflates. When you are creaming the butter with the sugar, aim to make it a light creamy fluffy yellow butter. I find it easiest to achieve this with a stand mixer or hand mixer - it's doable by hand as well but I hope you have some crazy arm muscles because I know I don't! 🙂

Make sure the butter has been softened (not fully melted) either by letting it sit for hours at room temperature or you can be lazy like me and nuke it in the microwave for 45 seconds (timing to this will depend on how powerful your microwave is). Make sure you nuke it 20 seconds at a time, a full 45-second nuke might make your butter splatter like crazy and I assume nobody enjoys cleaning butter-drenched microwaves

When you are mixing the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl with the flour, make sure your baking soda is not clumpy. If it is, use your fingers to break apart the clumps so that it can evenly distribute into the flour better.

When you start to mix in the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, add the dry mix in a few batches on a lower speed so the flour doesn't fly up into the air and get everywhere!

ROLLING OUT THE COOKIE DOUGH

Large balls of Ginger Molasses Cookies batter being rolled in sugar and placed on a cookie tray — "Holy Batman! Those are huge cookie dough balls!" It's intentional, I find the larger I make them, the flatter they get and it ensures I don't overcook them.

This five-spice ginger molasses cookie recipe makes a lot of cookies and when I say a lot I mean approximately 28-30 GIANT ginger molasses cookies, so if you make smaller cookies you will probably get double the amount but from my findings, the smaller the cookie you make the less flat they will be. I found that cookies made smaller tend to cook faster (and tend to gets overcooked faster). I like to use approximately 1.5 to 2 tablespoons of dough to make my cookie balls (they don't need to be flattened on the cookie sheet). They come out a little bit bigger than a golf ball size.

This ginger molasses cookie dough is very soft, and it's meant to be! Personally, I don't recommend putting them in the fridge to cool before rolling them into balls because cold cookie dough means the oven needs to take longer to cook it. If you find it hard to work with the dough because you have warm hands as I do and the dough gets super melty and mucky, then try to run your wrists under cold water to cool your hands down a bit. This works for me every time.

When you are rolling them, try to be quick and gentle and then toss the cookie balls into a bowl of sugar and swirl the bowl to coat the balls without touching them too much.

TROUBLESHOOTING THE COOKIE

Baking is finicky. There are so many factors to it - it literally is science and a lot of different things may impact how your cookies turn out. I like to use my first cookie tray to gauge how the rest of my cookies turn out so you may need to do the same if they don't turn out the way they should.

If your first tray of ginger molasses cookies are SUPER flat - try to add 3-5 more tablespoons of flour into the dough and chill the dough before rolling it into the sugar. In this case, even making the cookie balls smaller might help because it will look the dough faster and won't allow the cookie to 'melt'.
If your first tray of ginger molasses cookies is super puffy and cake-like - try adding more butter. Add approximately ¼ cup of melted butter and remix your dough again. Another thing I found was that skimping on sugar will produce a puffier cookie as well. I like to cut sugars in all my baked goods from time to time as well but in some cases, you can't if you want to achieve a certain consistency. Another thing to keep in mind as well is the measurement of your ingredients. Make sure you are not using a heaping cup of flour, use a knife to scrape off excess flour from the measuring cup.

HEAT AND OVERCOOKING THE COOKIES

It is SUPER IMPORTANT not to overcook these cookies. When you take these little guys out of the oven, they will feel SUPER soft and some might even look slightly puffy in the middle. It's okay! Just make sure you leave them on the cookie sheet to cool. No touchy, no moving it to a cookie rack - just let it be for approximately 10 minutes on the cookie sheet, it's still cooking with the residual heat from it. In that 10 minutes, your cookie will start to harden a bit and the middles should deflate and come down flatter in size. For the sake of speed, I like to have 2 cookie sheets on the go, so that when one tray is in the oven the other tray can sit outside and cool.

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