Home › Recipes › Home Made Ginger Cakes or Snaps
Home Made Ginger Cakes or Snaps
1/2 cup granulated Sugar, 1 cup Molasses (dark), 1/2 teaspoonful Salt, 1 teaspoonful Cinnamon, 4 cups Flour, 1/2 cup brown Sugar, 1/2 cup Lard, 1/4 cup lukewarm Water, 1 heaping teaspoonful Ginger, 1 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda.
Mix together sugar, molasses, lard, lukewarm water in which dissolve the Soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger and flour. Mix all together and work well.
This dough should be rather stiff. Let it stand covered with a damp towel as long as possible, if convenient over night. Knead it well until very smooth. Roll out thin and cut out with small cutter or in small pieces the size of a walnut and press flat. Set on slightly greased tins and dampen tops by covering with a damp towel just before baking, which makes them crack nicely. Oven should not be very hot.
A straightforward rolled molasses cookie from a baking soda pamphlet, with one unusual step — a long rest and a damp towel — that does most of the work. A few notes on quantities and heat.
- The hinge: rest the doughThe recipe asks for the dough to stand "as long as possible, if convenient over night," and the longer stand does most of the work: the flour hydrates fully, the soda begins reacting with the acid in the molasses, and the stiff dough becomes rollable without extra flour. If you do leave it overnight, refrigerate it covered rather than leaving it at room temperature.
- Oven temperature"Should not be very hot" points to a moderate oven, roughly 325-350 F on a modern dial. Molasses and brown sugar scorch quickly; at 375 F and above the edges darken before the centres set. Start checking at 8-10 minutes for thin cutouts, a little longer for the walnut-sized pressed pieces.
- Soda quantityOne level teaspoon for four cups of flour is modest by modern standards, but the acidity of the molasses is what activates it. Dissolve it in the lukewarm water as directed rather than adding it dry to the flour.
- Molasses"Dark" here means ordinary full-flavour molasses, not blackstrap. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral, and one full cup of it will overwhelm the ginger.
- LardHalf a cup of lard weighs roughly 3 to 4 oz (about 100-113 g). Rendered leaf lard is generally held to give the crispest snap; modern shelf-stable lard works, and unsalted butter or shortening will substitute at the cost of a slightly softer bite.
- Rolling and the damp towelRoll to about 1/8 inch for snaps. The damp towel laid over the cut shapes just before baking wets the surface so it sets first and then splits as the interior rises — that is the crackled top. A light spritz of water does the same thing.
- Pans"Slightly greased tins" means the barest film. Parchment on a modern sheet pan is easier and prevents the molasses edges from sticking.
- YieldThe dough runs to something over two pounds and gives about five to six dozen small cookies. They keep well in a tin for a week or more, and firm up as they cool.
Recipe pamphlets issued by baking soda makers circulated widely in America, given away with the product and written to demonstrate that the buyer could not do without it — hence the brand name printed inside the ingredient list. Ginger snaps were a natural showpiece: molasses is acidic, so it reacts with bicarbonate of soda without any need for cream of tartar or sour milk, and the resulting cookie keeps for weeks in a tin. The long overnight rest belongs to an older tradition of stiff, sparsely leavened molasses doughs, closely related to the spiced keeping-cakes of northern Europe, where dough was often held for days before baking. The distinction between "cakes" and "snaps" in the title is often said to be a matter of how thin the dough is rolled, though the recipe itself does not make clear which name attaches to which form.