Baking cookies for holidays and gifting them to friends and relatives is so much fun and that gets doubled when it is for a noble cause. The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap is an initiative led by Lindsay of Love and Olive Oil and Julie of The Little Kitchen, where in over thousand of bloggers around the world come together to register to bake cookies and swap them with three of the selected bloggers.
And each one participating gets to eat cookies from three of the other participants. So it’s kinda lot of cookies getting swaped all over the world. This is the first time, India is participating in this. Thanks to Roshni of The Vanilla Bean Bakery & Blog, who got this initiated for us as well. When I got my matches {blogger’s names to whom I had to send the cookies}, I was really excited to get this started.
I already knew what I was going to bake. I had shortlisted this amazing recipe of Chocolate chip cookies from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking from my home to yours. Dorie’s recipes have always proved to be great, except that they call for a lot of butter and sugar, which I always cut down to a great extent. But the end result come out fine with reduced butter and sugar too.
This was a recipe for classic chocolate chip cookies, which I adapted as per my taste and needs. And as Christmas is just round the corner, I made them a bit more festive. Yeah, I added a great good amount of some homemade candied ginger. So eventually that led to my twist on classic chocolate chip cookies and traditional gingersnap cookies. Cookies came out really really nice with an amazing pairing of dark chocolate chips and spicy candied ginger.
For candied ginger, I took David Lebovitz’s recipe. I have got half a jar left from that stock and that I have already thrown into my mincemeat which has been soaking in fridge for almost a week now. That is why love Christmas time. And I got three amazing type of cookies in my share. Riddhi of Cook By Book sent some wonderful chewy Maple Snicker Doodles, Roshni of The Vanilla Bean made me Lavendar Crisps and Deeba from Passionate About Baking sent over festive Wholewheat Gingerbread and Chocolate Pretzels.
Amazing amazing cookies to make this festive season brighter and more fun. This whole cookie swap program was really fun to do and the great thing is that all the funds raised through this go to the treatment of pediatric cancer in parternership with Cookies For Kids Cancer program. And this year Cookie Swap program has been able to raise over 13,000 USD. It feels great to have donated to such a noble cause, kinda amazing way to celebrate this festive season.
Ingredients
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking soda
150 gm butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
2/3 cup light brown sugar
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs
300 gm dark chocolate chips or chunks
3/4 cup finely chopped candied ginger (homemade recipe here)
Directions
- Preheat the oven at 190 degree C and line two baking sheets with baking paper or mat.
- Whisk together flour, salt and baking soda.
- Using an electric mixer, cream the butter until pale and fluffy. Beat in both the sugars, until well blended.
- Add egg one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in vanilla extract.
- Add the dry ingredients and mix well. Add chocolate chips and candied ginger and mix to combine well.
- Scoop out and place cookie dough on baking sheet taking one table spoon at a time, leaving about 2 inches space between two spoonfuls.
- Taking one baking sheet at a time, bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until they are brown at the edges and golden at the center. Take baking sheet out of oven and let rest for 1 minute. Then carefully using a metal spatula, place them on a wire rack to let cool completely.
- Store in an airtight container.