Gingerbread Cake Cookies

Like many great cookie recipes, this one was born by accident. One year while I was making gingerbread men, some careless dough-rolling birthed a man who baked up chubby, thick and cakey, not flat and crisp like his brothers. Surprisingly, this one turned out to be the best one of all. You can call it cookie evolution, the accident that led to the creation of these chewy, molasses-spiked cookies. With their warm, spiced flavor and cake-like softness punctuated by the coarse crunch of sparkly sugar, you might also call them a new holiday tradition.

It’s been years since my accidental discovery of these thick, cake-like cookies and they’ve made an appearance in my holiday cookie spread many times. Without fail, whenever they do, someone always approaches me to say, “That one, that gingerbread cake one…” in a tone of voice that says they could have eaten two dozen more. Accident, evolution, gingerbread cookie revelation — whatever you want to call it, this recipe has become a holiday classic for me.

The dough is a basic gingerbread cookie dough, spiced with a good amount of black pepper. Once made, it needs to firm up in the refrigerator for several hours, but it can also be made up to two days before baking. For maximum cakey thickness, the dough is formed into balls before being dipped in coarse sugar, which adds a pretty sparkle and compelling crunch to the finished cookies.

Although it might be tempting to substitute more butter for the vegetable shortening, the resulting cookies won’t have the same puffy softness. Instead, the all-butter version of this recipe sinks down into a flatter, crinkly cookie — still good, but in my opinion, not as much of a stand-out as the version with shortening.