I had the same issue, and you need to modify in one place, the css file, or you can overwrite the style in your html:
in the handsontable css file search for the style .handsontable td :
.handsontable td {
border-right: 1px solid #CCC;
border-bottom: 1px solid #CCC;
height: 22px; /*change to the desired height value*/
empty-cells: show;
line-height: 21px;
padding: 0 4px 0 4px;
/* top, bottom padding different than 0 is handled poorly by FF with HTML5 doctype */
background-color: #FFF;
vertical-align: top;
overflow: hidden;
outline-width: 0;
white-space: pre-line;
/* preserve new line character in cell */
}
Just change the "height" value to the one you want inside the css, or you just add the following line in the style section of your html document:
.handsontable td { height: <desired height>px;}
Additionally I would make the changes mentioned by RustyBadRobot in file jquery.handsontable.js, this could be used in some other calculation, but so far the change in css seems to be enough.
Please note that this is working with handsontable version 0.11.3, not sure if this is also true for other versions.