Modified from a recipe by Alton Brown on foodnetwork.com
Ingredients
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
In a medium mixing bowl, mix together flour, baking soda, ginger, cardamom, clove, and salt. Set aside.
Place the brown sugar and butter into the bowl of a stand mixer and beat on low speed until light and fluffy (1-2 minutes). Add the molasses, egg and fresh ginger and then beat on medium for 1 minute.
Remove the bowl from the stand mixer. Add the candied ginger, and then stir it into the batter with a silicone spatula. Add the flour mixture to the batter and stir to combine. We find that adding the flour mixture 1/3 at a time works well. You'll definitely have to scrape the bowl to get all of the flour mixed in.
Drop the resulting dough onto a cookie sheet or sheet pan lined with parchment paper. AB's recipe suggests using a 2-ounce scoop (disher). We use a normal kitchen spoon and drop one heaping spoonful per cookie, which is probably a bit more than 2 ounces. Make sure that you leave a few inches between each spoonful.
Bake 13-14 minutes, rotating the pan half-way through cooking. Remove the pan from the oven and allow the cookies to cool for 30 seconds before transferring them to a cooling rack. If you're not going to use the cookies right away, bag them and freeze them after they cool.
AB suggests 12 minutes for chewy cookies and 15 minutes for crunchy. We find that cookies baked for 13-14 minutes work well. They're fairly crunchy and keep with no problems over a 3-4 day hike. We usually bake them about 7.5 minutes, rotate, and then bake for another 6-7 minutes.
As described above, this yields 35-38 cookies. We find that for cookies of this size, 3 cookies makes a reasonable snack portion.