Oh Snap! It's a Ginger Snap! [2.0]

Picture from http://whatscookingamerica.net/Cookie/GingersnapCookies.htm

Have you ever eaten a ginger snap? If you haven’t, you’ve missed out on a savory morsel that can send your taste buds to sugar heaven. If you have, then you probably had a hard crunchy cookie with a very distinct burning sensation in the back of your mouth. Yet, there exist some amazing chefs that can create this wonderful little marvel by mixing and cooking the ingredients together to create an unimaginable flavor. My aunt is one of those few people. When I get my hands on those sugary blobs of dough, I cannot control myself. I try to devour every last one of them.

My addiction for these cookies hit me the very first time I ate one. I was young, maybe around six or seven years old, and my immediate family was visiting my aunt, as usual. On this occasion my aunt handed my sister and me a bag of brown sticky cookies in a plastic bag. At first I was hesitant; these cookies didn’t look like normal cookies. Eventually, I built up the courage to grab one and slowly did. I stuck a small crumb in my young and picky mouth, and as the miniscule chunk slowly passed over my developing taste buds, I knew I would be hooked for life. Immediately, I wolfed down the rest of the cookie and attempted to go for the whole bag, but my mom saw and restrained me so my sister could try one.

What makes these ginger snaps different? For starters, they are not at all hard and crunchy. They are soft and squishy. When you let them sit on top of one another they meld together and form one massively over-sized cookie. Then, when you try to pick one up, several others are molded to the first one, so you are forced to tear off layers of cookies until only one remains. As you peel off ginger snap after ginger snap, all of them crumble slightly in effort to stay part of the humungous heap of dough you picked up. The cookies themselves lack the strong burn that store bought ones supply but instead deliver a mix of sugar and ginger that will make a small kid want more. When the dough touches your tongue, it is not a solid but a delightfully freeform object that melds to your tongue as the ginger snap is slid, by your tongue, to the back of your throat. By the time the cookie has finally reached your stomach, your taste buds are screaming, “We want more!” So then, you put another one in your mouth and then another until you have gobbled every last cookie. The best part of this experience is that there isn’t even a sound as you cut the morsel with your teeth, so you don’t even realize that you have taken another bite.

Now then, you’re probably thinking, “I can make ginger snaps that are both soft and chewy,” and you may be right, but I highly doubt you can make them the same way my aunt did. My mother tried to replicate the recipe once. She pulled a recipe from one of her numerous cookbooks and set to work. She mixed together the dough just like she did for any other recipe and tossed in ginger and as well as some other spices that I was too young and lazy to recognize. Then, I helped her take globules of sticky cookie batter and put them on a greased metal cookie sheet. Next, the plate of uncooked dough was slid into the oven. I waited and waited, wondering if these ginger snaps would be the same, better, or worse than my aunt. Finally, the buzzer sounded, and the cookies were pulled out. They looked similar to but not the same as my aunt’s. I waited five more agonizing minutes for the steaming food to cool. “At last,” I thought as my young hand grabbed hold of one of the ginger snaps. I sank my teeth into the cookie expecting the same sugary taste I got when I ate one of my aunt’s. I was sadly disappointed. These cookies were not as sugary and were much harder, and they also contained a slight burning sensation analogous to the one is store bought ginger snaps.

The store bought ginger snaps are quite different than those made by my aunt. Store bought cookies are mass produced to make money, not to delight little children. The ginger snaps sitting on the shelf are hard so the contents do not spoil. However, by making the cookies hard, manufactures have made them difficult to eat. No little kid wants to try to bite into a cookie and discover that he or she has shattered most of the teeth in his or her mouth. Also, the store brand of ginger snaps has a very intense and spicy flavor. Now some may argue that this intense flavor makes the cookie better, but I disagree. The intensity actually makes my mouth burn for a few minutes after I have consumed the cookie.

The biggest difference between the overly mass produced cookies and my aunt’s homemade cookies is the overly cliché ingredient of love. This is one of the biggest variations between, not only my aunt’s ginger snaps, but all home cooked meals and manufactured ones. The reason this emotion called “love” makes such a humungous difference is the person shows his or her affection by tirelessly working to create a masterpiece. While most manufactured ones are prepared in a factory by an assembly line of machines.

Now about the recipe...I wish I had it. My aunt may love me and knows I adore her cookies, but, no matter how hard I plead, she will not give me the recipe. I have tried for years to get her to give it to me, but every attempt has been in vain. I may or may not get the recipe one day; it doesn’t really matter because this one recipe has comforted me when I was tortured by work and the stresses of everyday life. It has also reminded me that people do care about others.