I have to admit to skipping the icing and the black pepper. While many gingerbread recipes call for black pepper, I just couldn't imagine it and left it out. I figured if the final product did not taste right I would try the recipe again with the black pepper. The icing was more an issue of Jennifer being pregnant and it is recommended not to have undercooked eggs while pregnant.
Another possible change I made to the recipe was that I used fresh ginger. The recipe does not actually specify, but I wanted a cookie where I could taste the ginger and opted for fresh. I may have also made it a heaping tablespoon, but hard to tell. It takes a fair amount of effort to Microplane one tablespoon of ginger root.
Upon mixing the dough it becomes very sticky. Probably due to the molasses. I was only going to separate it into half instead of the recommended thirds, but due to the sticky nature I made three balls of various sizes. I put it in the fridge for longer than an hour and baked the first batch cutting the cookies with cutters we had that were fairly small. For whatever reason, it was easy to roll out the first batch to an even consistency. The second batch which I made a week later for a party were more difficult to roll out, and I blame that on it being the largest ball of dough out of the three. And possibly because I used larger cookie cutters which made inconsistencies in the depth of the dough more apparent.
I cooked them for seven minutes because I like my cookies soft. Supposedly cooking them longer would produce a more traditional hard gingerbread cookie, but that was not what I wanted.
Everyone who has tried them seemed to like them. I actually found them good, but not what I desired. I think my original craving was for a molasses ginger cookie like the type Starbucks sells. That type of cookie is thick and soft and has more ginger and molasses flavor in my opinion. Well, I guess the next time I want to make cookies, I'll search for one of those recipes.
The finished product
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