I love gingerbread. I know people who don’t, and to that I say: More for me. One of my favorite aspects of winter, though, is that gingerbread flavors are everywhere. Panera has an awesome gingerbread bagel. Starbucks has the gingersnap latte (which is not as good as last year – and I finally figured out today what it was missing: NUTMEG). I even saw an ad for Coldstone Creamery that showed a gingerbread cake with gingerbread ice cream inside and even though it’s far too cold for ice cream, I’m more than a little tempted.

I always make gingerbread cookies at this time of year, but admittedly – I’ve typically made them from a mix. This year, I figured I would do it right. I would actually make them from scratch. I dug through my binders of recipes (seriously: HUGE binders filled with recipes) and found two gingerbread cookie recipes. One was from Cooking Light magazine. The other was a Paula Deen recipe.

I made the CL version on Friday night, the Paula version on Sunday. The CL version had less butter, more molasses and used white sugar instead of brown. The Paula version had twice as many calories and more than twice as much fat (but I still have to say, nutritionally, gingerbread cookies? Not that bad for you. Thank god – because I have eaten A LOT of them in the past few days). The CL version was easier to roll and work with and though both versions tasted good, the CL cookies were actually better.

Once I finish eating all the gingerbread cookies that are sitting on my counter and finish the Paula gingerbread dough in my fridge, I will be using only the Cooking Light recipe for the rest of the season.

Oh the trouble I go through for my cookies.