Ginger Bump Cookies

We made these Ginger Bump Cookies during the last cooking party we had before cooking parties became a thing to avoid.

They’re a simple entry point into the Candies, Cookies, and Cakes chapter of Barbie’s Easy-As-Pie Cookbook because they just involve adding some extras to a prepackaged gingerbread mix. There are only a handful of other recipes in the book that rely on similar shortcuts though.

The simplicity of these cookies made them work well for a night when there was a lot going on in the kitchen, and they had a ton of flavor for something so quick and convenient. The ingredients are also basic enough that you should be able to pick them up the next time you venture out for quarantine supplies.

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Ginger Bump Cookies

Ingredients:

• • • one package of gingerbread mix
    • water
    • butter, melted
    • 1 cup rolled oats
    • 1/2 cup raisins

Preheat oven to 375. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

In a large bowl, stir gingerbread mix with the amount of water and melted butter that the package instructions suggest and stir until well blended. Add rolled oats and raisins to the gingerbread dough and then stir to combine. If the oats and raisins seem to dry out the dough too much, mix in 1 extra tablespoon of water.

Drop tablespoon-sized balls of dough onto prepared cookie sheets, leaving about 2 inches between each cookie. Bake for about 12 minutes, until cookies have browned. Makes about two dozen cookies.

-Adapted from Barbie’s Easy-As-Pie Cookbook 

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I don’t do much baking. And given that my go-to cookie recipe is the one on the bag of chocolate chips, this was a nice change of pace. I will say I was a little concerned about the gingerbread mix because “bake until browned” is not the most helpful guideline when the dough’s brown to start with, but I started watching them closely around Barbie’s original timing suggestion and pulled the baking sheets out when the bottoms were getting darker than the tops.

Extra Tips:

• We used one 14.5 ounce box of Betty Crocker Gingerbread Cake & Cookie Mix for this recipe, which called for 1/4 cup water and 3 tablespoons of melted butter. The proportions for other mixes may vary. The Betty Crocker mix includes instructions for making cake as well as cookies, so make sure you’re following the cookie version of the box recipe if your mix does the same.
• For the rolled oats, look for “old fashioned” oatmeal rather than the instant kind. Quick-cook styles of oatmeal may be too mushy after baking.
• Barbie suggests adding 1/2 cup of chopped nuts if you’d like to, but we thought the cookies had a good texture with just the oats and raisins.
• Our cookies are slightly larger than Barbie’s. She used teaspoons to measure out her batter, which supposedly gets you about 72 small cookies. We’re big girls though. We like big cookies.

Final Thoughts:

These ginger cookies are tasty! I’m not even a fan of raisins, and I still enjoyed them. The texture was chewy but not dense, and the flavors mixed together well. They’re hardly a “show off your skills” kind of snack, but I’d definitely make these again if I wanted to throw together something easy to take to a party.