here’s the problem with having tried and true cookie recipes that i’ve gathered and used over the last 15 years of christmas cookie baking: they’re tried and true. so i found with the sugar cookie. i had never tried the brown sugar cookies, so those were awesome. i’m expecting the ATK chocolate chip cookies to fall flat (there’s a reason our family recipe has been around so long).
i use a molasses/ginger cookie recipe that i modified from a martha stewart recipe i found about four years ago. it’s awesome, but i was really expecting the ATK recipe to outdo it.

the weird thing in this recipe? it calls for pepper. and a seemingly ungodly amount of spices, the likes of which (the measurements, that is) i’ve never seen in a cookie recipe.

this alton brown liquid measuring cup was the best present i ever got nate 🙂

 
i poured the molasses onto the whipped sugar and butter, and it looked so much like chocolate syrup on ice cream that i almost dug in. that would’ve been a mouthful of weird, though.
basic cookie assembly. roll into balls, roll in sugar, bake. once again, ATK called for 22 cookies, and i came out with 32.

 
they sure LOOK pretty! final result? there is something about them that just doesn’t cut it. maybe they’re now quite sweet enough, or the huge amounts of all these kicky spices just don’t play well together. and one of the things mentioned in the recipes is that molasses cookies generally are dry and taste like cardboard. quite frankly, i found these a little dry. well, dryer than my tried and true molasses cookie. that said, they are still cookies, and still yummy.
so, ATK 1, kate 2. i will TRY the chocolate chip ones, but i’m not holding out much hope.