do NOT make these cookies

These are my mom's cookies. Ginger-spice sugar cookies. I'm sure many people have this recipe, but this is the one cookie I remember making with my mom. And I finally shared this tradition with Isabela yesterday.

But it almost wasn't to be.

This recipe calls for ground cloves, but all I had in the cupboard were two bottles of whole cloves. I thought maybe the kids could pound the cloves into little crumbs, so we put some whole ones into ziploc baggies and I gave them spoons to bang them with ( I think Isabela actually used a rock at some point.) But after a few minutes and a lot of noise, the pieces weren't small enough. I gave up and said we'd just have to wait until I could go to the store to get the ground cloves, then got distracted by something else and went about my day.

But Isabela kept pounding away.

After about ten minutes, she declares hopefully, "I think I did it! Are these small enough?" And they looked pretty tiny to me. I wasn't sure, but after all her hard work, I thought why not?

We carefully poured the little specks onto the teaspoon over a cup measure so we wouldn't waste any of our precious ground bits. We only had half the amount needed, but I read somewhere that whole cloves were stronger than ground cloves, so I figured it would be plenty. So we measured out all the ingredients. We poured. We mixed. We beat. Keep in mind, we don't own an electric mixer. I only think of buying one when I'm mixing something, and by the time I've finished mixing, I'm glad I haven't spent the money.

So Isabela was dissappointed when I told her you have to refrigerate the dough for one hour before you roll the cookies. And I said, "You know why this is good? It gives us time to clean up the kitchen before we make the cookies." And my girl that HATES to do dishes, sat at the sink beside me washing the mountain of dirty dishes we had sitting around.


Then we baked them. And we tasted the first one. And she loves them just as much as I do. Then I told her, "You know the bad thing about these cookies? They're so good, you never have enough left to give to anyone else."

We have four left.