30 Minute Thin and Crispy Gingersnap Cookies

These easy, homemade gingersnap cookies are thin and crispy, and rolled in sparkly coarse sugar for the perfect crunchy ginger snap cookie recipe. These ginger snaps are a great make ahead cookie - either bake them ahead, or store the frozen cookie dough in the freezer for later!

Hi hi!

Just popping in to share the recipe for these homemade gingersnap cookies! These cookies are an addition to my collection of holiday cookie recipes that I am working on, and something that I have been meaning to work on for a while.

This ginger snap cookie recipe is a twist on my soft and chewy ginger molasses cookies - I tweaked the recipe to make it a little thinner, and baked them longer to give the perfect thin gingersnap cookie that is crunchy around the edges and slightly chewy in the middle. You could also call them a molasses crinkle cookie, or if you're familiar with gingernut biscuits, these are my perfect version of that! They make a great Christmas cookie, but to be honest, I make these year round.

Gingersnap Cookie Ingredients

These homemade gingersnap cookies are super easy, have a quick prep time, and are a no chill ginger snap cookie recipe, meaning that you can have them in the oven super quickly, and baked in about 16-17 minutes!

• Butter. I use unsalted, make sure that it is at nice room temperature.
• Granulated sugar. Either Caster sugar or regular granulated sugar works - this is the beauty of baking by weight, 200g of sugar is 200g sugar!
• Brown sugar. Either light brown sugar or dark brown sugar works here.
• Egg. Just one to bind - I haven't tried subbing it sorry!
• Molasses. Molasses adds to the depth of flavour in the ginger snap cookie. If you can't get your hands on molasses, you can use treacle or golden syrup, but it is worth getting some molasses if you can! I use unsulphured molasses, but I have tested this with blackstrap molasses and it works great.
• Vanilla. I use vanilla bean paste, but extract works great.
• All-purpose flour. Also called plain flour - nothing fancy here.
• Spices. These are a pretty spicy gingersnap cookie recipe - I use ground ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom in my recipe. The cardamom really gives the ginger snaps something special. You can use extra cinnamon if you don't have it, but I love what is does here.
• Baking soda. I use baking soda in this recipe to give the cookie spread, and baking soda also reacts with molasses.
• Salt. Skip it if you are using salted butter, but properly salting your baking, especially your sweet baking, makes such a difference! You won't necessarily notice the salt, but it rounds things out so nicely.

How to make Thin and Crispy Cookies

I often get a lot of questions about how I tweak a recipe - now that I have been running my food blog for a number of years, I often turn to my own recipes as a jumping off point when working on a new recipe.

For this ginger snap recipe, I used my ginger molasses cookies as a starting point. I love the recipe, but wanted something slightly thinner and crunchier, so here are the changes that I made, which are often changes I make in other cookie recipes too to manipulate them how I like.

• Changed the ratio of brown sugar to white sugar. My ginger molasses cookies have a higher ratio of brown sugar to white, which makes them thicker and spread less. I switched up the ratios for these ginger snap cookies, meaning the cookies spread more, and have a perfect chewy texture which gets crunchy around the edges.
• Drop the flour content sightly. This increases the ratio of butter to flour, meaning the cookie spreads a little more in the oven.
• Increase the molasses. I tweaked it by just a little, but this help with spread.
• Increase baking soda. I use baking soda rather than baking powder in the cookies, and increased the quantity slightly to ensure there was enough to give the cookies a little rise and not be cancelled out by the molasses. My general rule is baking soda helps with spread, and baking powder helps with puff.
• Bake for longer. This is a pretty simple one, but to get that lovely crunchy gingersnap cookie, I increased the bake time slightly. If you want them even more crunchy, bake them for a little longer!

Can Ginger Snap Cookies be made ahead of time?

These gingersnap cookies are great to make ahead of time, as they are a super robust cookie and keep super well in a container. Alternatively you can make the dough ahead of time and store the cookie dough balls in the freezer until you are ready to bake, or bake some off and then freeze the rest of the dough.

How do you store Ginger Snap Cookies?

Store gingersnap cookies in an airtight container at room temperature. They will keep for up to a week stored correctly.

I haven't tried freezing the baked cookie - I would freeze the dough as fresh baked is always so much nicer!

How to freeze cookie dough

This gingersnap cookie recipe is great to make ahead - the dough stores super well frozen, so you can pull it out and bake whenever you need.

It is important to not coat the balls of dough in the sugar before you freeze them, otherwise the sugar will get all weird and weepy when you bring them out to re bake.

To freeze the dough, scoop it out, roll into balls, then flash freeze the dough and store in the freezer in an airtight container or bag for up to three months.

For more tips and tricks on freezing dough and baking from frozen, check out my post: How to freeze cookie dough

How to bake Gingersnaps from Frozen

I tested this out with some of the gingersnap cookie dough that I had frozen, and found that the best way to bake the frozen dough and get the most similar outcome is to bake it at a lower temperature - 325°f / 160°c (I cover this more on other cookies in my post on how to freeze cookie dough). This gives the frozen dough more time to spread.

When you are ready to bake from frozen, remove the dough from the freezer and leave it to stand at room temperature to soften very slightly while the oven preheats. This makes the surface of the cookie dough ball slightly sticky, and means the sugar will stick to the outside.

Roll the cookies in sugar and bake for 17-18 minutes or until the cookies are your desired level of doneness.

Frequently Asked Questions

What tools and equipment do you use?
You can find a full list of the tools and equipment I use on my products page

Can Ginger Snaps be made Gluten Free?

I haven't tried it sorry, so I'm not sure!

Can this recipe be made without a stand mixer?

Yes, if you don't have a stand mixer you can use an electric hand mixer, or make by hand if you have a lot of elbow grease!

Can I roll the gingersnap cookies in something else?

Yes - do whatever you like here! You could roll the cookies in ginger sugar like I did in my ginger molasses cookie recipe, or roll them in a cinnamon sugar mixture.

For more holiday cookie recipes, check out:

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