In search of the elusive ginger cream recipe

Each Christmas I make a ridiculous quantity of cookies. It's never as many as I hoped to have made, or bought the ingredients for, but it's sufficiently ridiculous.

Along with several repeat options, I tried three new recipes this year. The chocolate toffee cookies, while not exceptionally looky, bear repeating. They were a finalist in this year's Taste cookie contest, and were clearly the people's choice winner in the tasting in the lobby. They call for salt on top, and I tried using Himalayan pink salt to make them more festive, but it's hard to retain that pink color after it's finely grated. At any rate, it merited a spot in the 10-cookie lineup.

I also tried the Cranberry Ecstasy Bar recipe from the Taste section, because it looked suitably festive and sounded really good with crystallized ginger, dried cranberries and white chocolate. They were fine-ish, but not really worth the effort, so I'll move on.

And I'll have to move on in my quest to find a ginger cream recipe that's like the one my grandmother made. Our mother didn't keep Grandma's recipe, and my sister and I regret that. We both remember it somewhat fondly, although naturally after all these years we remember it some what differently, which makes it that much less likely I'll find a recipe to match. She remembers a sandwich cookie filled with a coconut filling. I remember a very light ginger colored cookie with white frosting on top. Who knows, perhaps she made both.

I started with the ginger cream recipe from the Pillsbury cookbook, figuring Grandma would likely have used one of the Big Four major cookbooks. It's not bad, with cloves, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, and I tried to make it dressier for the holiday by sprinkling crystallized ginger and gold sanding sugar on top. But it's clearly not the recipe. I've seen several recipes online, which also don't look likely to match my memory. Perhaps in a church cookbook ...

If 10 cookies seems ridiculous, it's nothing on this gingerbread replica of the Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars.