My passion for warm and bold flavors has found its way into most of my favorite main dishes ... I suppose it was only a matter of time before my taste buds started clammering for a little more spice to dessert as well.  However, I am timid in the kitchen, tinkering only slightly with tried and true recipes since I seem to be less than instinctual when it comes to pairing flavors.  So when my cravings for those crystalized cubes of sweet yet  potent ginger set in, I conservatively reached for two favorite recipe ideas, Molasses Cookies and good ol' Tollhouse Cookies (with the dairy-free conversion, of course) ...

Since chocolate and ginger are a match made in heaven (according to my palate), my first venture was to spike chocolate chip cookies with some sugary ginger goodness.  Because this rhizome can be so potent, it must be finely diced into little bits before adding to any delicate recipe ...

The resulting Ginger Tollhouse Cookie Recipe was truly delicious ...

With an ego boost from this little success, I decided to sneak some crystalized ginger into a Molasses Cookie recipe I was trialing out.  I had made this type of cookie with great success many times before, but this recipe was amazingly vegan (dairy-free, egg-free), so I was venturing into some new territory.  As luck would have it, the recipe didn't call for any ginger, it was the perfect backdrop ....

Whoa!  My first bite of the cookies while still warm was like a flavor slap in the face.  Granted, I loved it.  Sugar, cinnamon, molasses, and ginger each competing for a single spot on my taste buds.  Seriously, overpoweringly, yummy!  This flavor concoction is not for those ultra-sensitive taste buds, but for ginger lovers like myself, it is definitely worth a trial.

Alas, I can not divulge the actual recipe I used, since it is coming out in a new food allergy cookbook.  However, it isn’t too far off from this one for Egg-Free Dairy-Free Molasses Cookies.  To avoid a ginger overload, try substituting cinnamon for the ginger in this recipe (the recipe I used had cinnamon as the main spice) and add finely diced crystalized ginger bits to your hearts content!

A little hint too, I didn’t actually have any regular/dark molasses on hand, but did have blackstrap molasses.  Obviously this is a bit too bitter for a 1:1 sub, but after looking around at substitution ideas, I settled on a 50/50 mix of the blackstrap molasses and maple syrup.  It turned out to be a winner!