Soft Ginger DATE Cookies for Tu BiShvat

With Tu B’Shvat, the birthday of the trees, right around the corner I wanted to share a recipe that had some sort of fruit in it.  Get it? Fruit…trees…  Recently a really great and healthyrecipe literally fell into my lap where Dear Husband dropped it.  You may not know this, but Dear Husband is a runner.  He actually runs for exercise, unlike me where my running consists of “running” to the store, “running” to carpool, “running” to Shul, and “running” from running (HA!).  Anyway, Dear Husband really likes to run.  He’s been running since he ran track in high school and has even run in races.  How cool is that?!! One of the few things that Dear Husband treats himself to is Runner’s World Magazine.  He loves to read the articles, and once in a while he shares some of the fun articles with me and especially loves to share the interesting and healthyrecipes the magazine publishes. A few weeks ago he tore out a recipe for Soft Ginger Cookies by Chef Gesine Bullock Prado, which for the purposes of tying it to Tu B’Shvat, am renaming Soft Ginger DATE Cookies.  These cookies are really, super gingery, but are also deliciously sweet from the addition of chopped datesand molasses.  They were pretty easy to make, but when I made the cookies I didn’t realize that regular molasses is notthe same as blackstrap molasses.  I sort of suspected that they weren’t the same but was prompted to actually look up the difference online when my cookie “dough” seemed to be a little on the loose side.  Also, because the “dough” was more like a really thick batter, the turbinado sugar kind of melted into the cookies.  Sigh.  It turns out that blackstrap molasses is way thicker than the regular kind.  Oh well.  The cookies still came out great, and I even made them gluten-free (great for the GFE (Gluten Free Eater)!!) by using spelt flour instead of whole-wheat flour.  I think that using the whole-wheat flour instead of the spelt would also have impacted the consistency of the cookie “dough”, but as I’m trying to be a GFE lately and the recipe said you could use either one, I opted for the spelt flour. 

 

Even though the weather is incredibly cold and snowy here in Chicago, and Dear Husband has to run inside on a treadmill, we’ll be able to have a Tu B’Shvat date (cookie) thanks to Runners World J. 

 

Chag Sameach!

 

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