I was looking for a contrasting cookie to go with my "Christmas assortment" this year when I happened upon the recipe for Gingerbread Snowflakes in The Gourmet Cookbook (2004). These cookies are not very sweet, easy to make (you don't have to take out the mixer) and sturdy. This means that you can box them up and send them halfway around the world and they will hold up very nicely. Plus, I think they'll be impervious to kids grabbing and slathering them with icing straight from the tube. The recipe suggested icing them with royal icing, the egg white-based decorating icing, which I didn't do. Subsequently, the the first sheet of cookies didn't seem quite sweet enough, so I sprinkled the rest with granulated sugar. In the future, I might press on some coarse sugar crystals for a prettier cookie. These are a very straightforward kind of cookie.
Ingredients
2/3 cup molasses (not robust)
2/3 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, cut into tablespoon bits
1 large egg
3 3/4 to 4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
Move oven racks to upper and lower thirds of the oven and preheat to 325 F.
Mix together molasses, brown sugar and spices in a large saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. My brown sugar was extremely hard but softened up eventually with the molasses and heat.

Stir in the baking soda. Now watch out - the mixture looks innocuous but will foam up to double its volume.

Add butter 3 pieces at a time and stir until melted fully each time.

Then add the eggs and stir. Add the salt and 3 3/4 cups of flour and mix completely to form what looks like gingerbread modelling clay.

Now at this point, the Gourmet recipe recommended kneading the dough until soft and easy to handle, while dusting with the remaining 1/4 cup of flour. I did knead the dough but did not require any extra flour. The dough handled very easily without the extra flour. Halve the dough, wrap one half in plastic wrap and keep at room temperature.
Roll out the remaining dough on a flour-dusted surface if required ( I didn't need extra flour) into a 14-inch round. Stamp out as many cookies as possible with cookie cutters. For my part, I found that I could fit a huge amount of stars in one round of rolling and cutting.

An offset spatula (pictured above) really comes in handy here for transferring cut cookies to the cookie sheet. As well, I find it useful to leave as much of the dough around the cut cookie as possible while transferring the cookie; this preserves the cut edge of the cookie and prevents it from getting too squashed while you are moving the uncooked cookie to the baking sheet.

Grease up your cookie sheet; my mother swears by bacon fat poured into a clean Campbell's soup tin, but I like to use the paper or foil the butter for the recipe was wrapped in. This is an efficient way to use up the tiny bits of butter still clinging to the wrapper. Transfer the uncooked cookies to 2 cookie sheets.

Put one pan of cookies on the top rack and the second pan to the bottom rack. Bake for 5-6 minutes, then switch positions and bake for 5-6 minutes more. Transfer cookies to racks to cool. Roll out remaining dough scraps and make more cookies. These cookies are crisp, dark, and full of warm spices that would snuggle up nicely beside a plate of buttery vanilla shortbread on a day when its freezing outside.