Cubicle kitchen: Frosted Gingerbread Cookies

There are many different kinds of cookies, not just in flavors, but in textures.  Soft, chewy, cakey, crispy, crunchy, full of chunks, rolled in sugar, frosted, or just a simple dough.  Some people have favorites, but I think that every cookie has a place on the plate.  Why limit yourself to one or the other when you can bake one and then the other?

Take for example, ginger cookies.  You have ginger snaps on one end of the spectrum, and from there you can go all the way into cake territory with gingerbread (like this).  Now might not be the traditional time of year to be playing around with gingerbread, but I love warm spices whether they're for Christmas, or Christmas in July.

I think these land closer to the cake side, being slightly chewy, but very soft.  And, of course, there's the frosting.  I like to think of these as a gingerbread version of those Lofthouse frosted sugar cookies that are always so tempting when I passed them in the bakery section.  Recipe-wise, this isn't too impressive a post, because it's just the combination of preparing a mix with a fat substitution, and using leftovers from a past recipe.  But taste-wise, these are delicious.

Frosted Gingerbread Cookies

For the cookies:
I used a Gingerbread Cookie Mix, substituting the butter for half the amount of plain yogurt.  Otherwise, prepared as directed to make drop cookies.  The dough was extremely sticky, so be prepared to take mess-mitigating action, like chilling the dough and keeping a bowl of water nearby to keep hands wet.

For the frosting:
What I used was actually leftover frosting from Gingerbread Cubed, made from Blue Bell's Gingerbread House ice cream.  After making those, I froze 2-3 cups of frosting in an airtight container.  After defrosting, I used about half of that on these cookies. That recipe came from Culinary Concoctions by Peabody: Ice Cream-Buttercream Frosting.