Molasses Cookies

It snowed! In October! Can you believe it? It was the most cliche moment I’ve experienced in my life. I wake up, thrust the curtains open and start bouncing all over the place, unable to contain my excitement. The pine tree outside my window was covered in snow, and the white flakes were still falling from the sky. It was beautiful. And cliche. But beautiful.

With this cold weather, I immediately have the tendency to create an even bigger cliche. So I make hot chocolate (with marshmallows.) I light all of my cinnamon and spice scented candles. I turn up the heat in the house, open every curtain in the house and bake some cookies. But they can’t be just any cookies. They have to taste like Christmas, Thanksgiving, winter and fall. When you eat one, you have to be able to taste Santa’s beard. Or Mrs. Clause’s perfume. Whatever is to your liking. They should smell like reindeer poop. Which is actually supposed to smell quite exquisite, I hear.

All jokes aside, I got this recipe from my family cookbook. My mom grew up in a small town in rural Iowa, and it used to be one of the bigger small-towns in the area. But when I visited last summer, it had gotten smaller. It had a gas station, a school, and about 30 houses. And a couple of churches. I loved it. It was actually really fun to visit all of the people there, all of them remembering the glory days whenever you had a conversation with them. Another great thing about her town is that they created a cookbook, filled with the town’s favorite recipes, a lot of them handed down from generations. I think of it as my family cookbook. At the bottom of every left page, there are quotes. My favorite one is, “Be patient. A soaked dish doesn’t need scraping.” And the pages are all falling out, the covers no longer able to hold the now yellow pages. The book was written (I’m guessing) with a typewriter, and you can see all of my mother’s notes in it. I love it. If this is the only thing of my mother’s that I get when she dies, I’d be happy. In fact, I call dibs. Enjoy!

Molasses Cookies
Original Nerd With Taste Recipe

Ingredients:
3/4 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 tsp. soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger

Directions: 
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Mix the shortening, sugar, egg and molasses in a bowl. In a separate bowl, sift the flour, soda, salt, cloves, cinnamon and ginger, and stir. Combine the wet and dry ingredients in one bowl. Roll the dough into balls the size of walnuts, and place on a cookie sheet.
Put in the oven, and bake for 8-12 minutes, or until they become set, not hard.