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!

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. If you're familiar with gingernut biscuits, these are my perfect version of that! They make a great holiday cookie, but to be honest, I make these year round.

The best part? These are done in 30 minutes - the dough is ready to go by the time your oven is preheated.

How to make Thin and Crispy Cookies - the recipe testing process

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!

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.

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