The holiday season is full of heady smells: boozy eggnog breath, roasting meat, and sticky fir pitch, to name a few.Best of all, however, are those baking spices.Those warm flavors of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg appear in a wide variety of classic dishes, but they find their ultimate vehicle in cookies.No, not gingerbread men. (Though they do make a fine subject for some food-based erotica.) We're talking about ginger snaps.
Courtesy of Claire Ptak, dessert maven and owner of London's Violet Bakery, these from-scratch cookies are dead-simple to make, even on an eggnog-hazed Christmas morning.In addition to the spices above, Ptak also includes pinches of cardamom, coriander, and even paprika—which might sound more like the ingredients for a curry, but instead give these cookies a subtle complexity that the store-bought stuff can't match.Throw in some rich molasses, dark brown sugar, and plenty of butter, and you have cookie that is as much a reason for the season as anything else.