No Clear Winner

For 40 some years I have been baking Christmas cookies using an ancient Betty Crocker recipe for gingerbread men. Same recipe for decades. My sons grew older and moved away, so now I send them tins each year of their favorite cookies, and they always want gingerbread men. 

This year I tried a different recipe and had a bake-off between the old style and the new.

Here are the men from the new recipe.

Here are the cookies from the old recipe. Both were okay. There was no clear winner.

I wanted to switch up the recipe this year because the old Betty Crocker cookies were always a pain. They never had a nice texture, they baked up cracked and rough looking as you can see. Flour dusting from rolling out the dough didn't always bake off (and I picked out the best looking for this photo). 

They used shortening, not butter, and they baked at 375, very high for a cookie so some of the googly eyes melted 👀. This recipe makes a hard crispy cookie. I pack a piece of soft white bread in the tins to add enough moisture to keep them from becoming hardtack.

So I tried a new recipe that promised softer gingerbread. It uses no shortening, only butter. It made a much nicer baked texture and better shape. I gave up on the melting googly eyes and gave them traditional raisin eyes.

The bake off verdict: 

The old shortening based cookies are, as always, very hard and they crack and look bad, but are gingery tasting and a bit spicy.

The new butter based recipe is easier on the teeth, and the texture is smoother, but they have little ginger taste, despite using the same ginger / nutmeg / allspice quantities as the other recipe. They taste buttery, go figure.

There's no winner here, but it doesn't matter. I don't think either of my sons even likes gingerbread, they only want a reminder of childhood. So I send them a tinful of memories every Christmas, baked with love, raisin bellybuttons and googly eyes.

(If you have a gingerbread rolled cookie recipe that is gingery and spicy and stays chewy-soft, send it to my editor. Thanks.)