Spiced Pear Cookies

I had a bowl of pears that I thought were a bit too, ermmm, ripe for just plain eating, but I was not feeling the love for making a spiced pear cake, or even for playing around with the classic pear crisp recipe I have stashed in my ‘Try This!’ folder (well, OK, if Jen’ is reading this, on the desktop of my MacBook with a bunch of other recipes, but that IS my ‘Try This!’ folder!).

What to do?

QuickLikeABunny, I consulted…

nope.

NOT da Google – not this time at least.

This time I whipped out my iPhone and the allrecipes.com DinnerSpinner™ app. Since I had those rapidly ripening pears to wrangle, I bypassed the spinner feature – which is still kinda cool – in favor of their search option, entered ‘pears’, and was amazed at the sheer variety of pear and blue cheese combinations! Much as I, personally, love pears and blue cheese, I was in the mood for a little something more sweet than savory; and the nice folk – well, Cheryl Statt, really – at allrecipes did not let me down: cookies! Even better, spicy cookies! Pears and cinnamon and ginger, oh my!

The original recipe called for walnuts, which I didn’t use – tho’ now that I recall, there is that lovely bag o’ black walnuts from the Dane County Farmers’ Market in the freezer – nuts! – as well as raisins, which I left out in favor of adding about 1/8 cup or so chopped crystallized ginger to the powdered ginger and cinnamon called for.

INGREDIENTS
Cookies:
•1/2 cup butter, softened
•1-1/2 cup packed brown sugar
•1 egg
•1 tsp vanilla
•2 cups flour
•1-1/2 tsp baking powder
•1 tsp ground cinnamon
•1 tsp ground ginger
•1 pear, peeled, cored and diced – I used two
•1/2 cup raisins
•1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Icing:
(optional, the cookies are good either way)
•1-1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
•2-1/2 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350º.

Combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and ginger (crystallized too, if you’re using it) together in a bowl and set aside.

Cream the butter and the brown sugar together in a large mixing bowl and then beat in the egg and vanilla.

Mix in the flour mixture to make a batter, then add the pears, along with the nuts and the raisins, if you’re using them, and combine.

Drop the cookies by rounded tablespoon (a cookie scoop is a really good thing here) onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.

Bake for about fifteen minutes – mine were well and truly done at around 13-1/2 – then remove from the oven, let sit for a couple of minutes to set up, then cool on a rack.

While the cookies are baking and cooling, make your glaze/frosting by stirring the lemon juice into the confectioners’ sugar.

Once the cookies are fully cooled, top them lightly with the frosting/glaze.

I ended up with four dozen cookies, and the frosting/glaze covered about three dozen or so, but these cookies are really just as nice without, so I choose to look at it as providing options to any cookie munchers who may be stopping by in need of a little sumpin’ sumpin’.