Recipe: Almond Cookies with Molasses, Ginger, and Cardamom

Since our new Soul Salt Soak has warming and aromatic cardamom, we thought that a great pairing for showing some love would be these soft and chewy cookies full of warming spices! These cookies (which happen to also be gluten free and can be made vegan) also have an extra boost of magnesium from the almond flour, dates, and pecans, and even the blackstrap molasses adds some extra magnesium, calcium, potassium. Perfect to make for your sweetie, your kiddos… or for yourself!


Ingredients

• 1 ½ cups softened butter*
• 8 medjool dates*, blended in a food processor with 2-3 tblsp water to make a paste
• ½ cup sugar (optional - add if you find the dates to not be sweet enough) 
• 2 large eggs*
• ½ cup blackstrap molasses
  
• 4 ½ cups almond flour* 
• 4 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tblsp ground cardamom (if you can, grinding the cardamom seeds yourself makes them SO wonderfully aromatic!) 
• ¼ tsp salt
• ¼ cup chopped pecans (optional) 
• Coarse sugar (like turbinado) for topping

NOTE: If you love spices, feel free to add more ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom! 

Directions

Preheat oven to 350. In a large bowl, cream together butter, date paste, and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs and molasses. Combine the flour, ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, pecans, and salt. Add to butter and sugar blend a little at a time and mix well.

Drop 2-inch balls of dough onto ungreased cookie sheet (If you have parchment paper to line your cookie sheet, it will help the cookies come off really easily) and sprinkle with turbinado sugar. Bake 12-13 minutes, watching to make sure they don’t begin to burn on the bottom. Remove carefully with a spatula - they will be soft and chewy! Cool on wire racks. Enjoy with people you love! 

Makes at least 2 dozen large cookies. 

* Ingredient Substitutions
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This recipe can be made vegan. To replace the butter, we actually used Miyoko’s cultured vegan salted butter made from cashews. You can also replace the two eggs with 2 tbsp of ground flaxseed mixed into 6 tbsp of water and allowed to stand 10-15 minutes. (The flax eggs will work in this recipe; however, know that the cookies will be extra soft!)

To make this recipe nut free, all purpose flour or gluten free flour blends can be used instead of almond flour, and leave out pecans.

If you do not have dates, replace the 8 dates + 1/2 cup sugar with 2 cups of sugar. 

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