Brown Sugar Cookies

We've all been snowed in (in Virginia Beach, that means 7") for two and a half days now, so I thought it might be nice to bring some cookies to work tomorrow, to power us through a Friday where we might not otherwise be terribly productive. So I take these out of the oven, put them on the cooling racks, and check my phone... and we're closed tomorrow. But they came out really well!

Brown Sugar Cookies

Ingredients
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp salt
12 Tbsp (that's a stick and a half) butter, room temperature
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar, packed
2 eggs

Equipment
mixer (I used a hand mixer)
baking sheets
cooling racks (optional but highly recommended)

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 375F. In one bowl, whisk together your flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, and salt. In another bowl, beat the butter and brown sugar together until it's creamy. Add one egg, and beat until it's incorporated. Add the flour mixture and beat until it's incorporated, too. If you find that it's too powdery/crumbly to be cookie dough (like I did), add another egg and beat until incorporated. Grease your baking sheets (the original recipe called for parchment paper but I like crispy-bottomed cookies, and that's what I got) and drop heaping spoonfuls of dough about an inch or two apart. Bake for ten minutes.

Yields
I forgot to count before we started eating them, but if memory serves, I made about two dozen cookies.

Total time
30 minutes: 10 minutes to let the butter sit out and get soft; 10 minutes to measure and mix ingredients while the oven heated; 10 minutes to bake the cookies.

Cleanup rating 3/5
Cookie dough is sticky, and it's on a lot of things here: mixer beaters, bowl, spoon, the counter, my hands... Plus I tend to have "poof!" moments when measuring things like flour and just total messes with brown sugar, so the counter needed a complete wipe-down as well. And don't forget cleaning the baking sheets as well. But hey... you can lick the beaters if you aren't mortally afraid of salmonella.

Difficulty rating 4/5
As far as baking goes, this is pretty simple. The trickiest thing would be using the mixer without decorating the walls with cookie dough, followed by making evenly sized drops of dough so everything bakes the same. Not too hard.

Flavor rating 9/10
These are soooo good. They aren't insanely sweet (considering that about 1/3 of their weight must be in sugar) and - because I greased the pans - I got the crispy bottoms I like, but still a soft cookie.