Mint Chocolate Cookies

By Noel Lizotte

There are some foods that go together per­fectly. Peanut but­ter and jelly. Tomato soup and grilled cheese. Mint and chocolate.

This cookie recipe com­bines the two fla­vors of mint and choco­late into a chewy cookie.

Talk about a favorite on the Christ­mas cookie plates! This cookie is dark and rich. The sweet choco­late is off­set by the fresh mint flavor.

Mint Choco­late Cookies

1 cup but­ter, softened

1¾ cups sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp pep­per­mint extract

2 cups all pur­pose flour

1 cup cocoa

1 tsp bak­ing soda

½ tsp bak­ing powder

½ tsp salt

Pre­heat oven to 350°F. Using an elec­tric mixer, beat but­ter and sugar in large bowl until well blended. Beat in eggs and pep­per­mint extract. Grad­u­ally add flour, cocoa pow­der, bak­ing soda, bak­ing pow­der and salt and beat until well blended. Drop by spoon­fuls on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake cook­ies until edges begin to firm but cen­ter still appears soft, about 9 minutes.

Make it a Meal: serve these cook­ies as part of your after­noon snack. They’re great with a glass of milk or a hot cup of coffee!

Approx­i­mate Nutri­tional Infor­ma­tion: Serv­ings Per Recipe: 36, Amount per Serv­ing: Calo­ries: 109, Total Fat: 5g, Cho­les­terol: 2mg, Sodium: 146mg, Total Carbs: 15g, Pro­tein: 1g.

Vari­a­tions: chop up some choco­late mint patty can­dies and mix in the dough before bak­ing. Or crush a cou­ple of candy canes to add some hol­i­day color and extra mint flavor.

These cook­ies pack­age well for ship­ping, too. Use plas­tic wrap and wrap two cook­ies together, with the flat bot­toms next to each other. Wrapped tightly they stay fresh for mail­ing long distance.

You can also freeze these cook­ies. I like to make a batch of cook­ies and freeze half to two thirds of them. That way, I don’t feel like I have to eat all the cook­ies in one week­end! You know, cook­ies taste best when they’re fresh. So I tend to eat cook­ies within the first few days of baking.

If I stash them in the freezer, I can pull out a few at a time for munch­ing or adding to lunches. Frozen cook­ies thaw eas­ily by noon in the lunch box.

Of course, my hus­band likes hav­ing cook­ies on hand for snack­ing. So I don’t have to worry about them going to waste, (or to my waist).

This year’s Christ­mas cookie plates had a vari­ety of cook­ies on them. The ones I’ve men­tioned in pre­vi­ous columns as well as a few others.

Folks like to have a sam­pling of cookies.

This year I made: Choco­late No Bake, Buck­eyes, Molasses Snaps, Choco­late Chips, Peanut But­ter, Mini Cup­cakes, and Sugar Cookies.

The nice thing about cookie plates, you can mix up the cookie types as much or as lit­tle as you like! If you’re fam­ily doesn’t care for one type of cookie, leave it off. If they favor one type par­tic­u­larly, then you may want to make up an entire plate of that recipe!

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! This recipe is sim­i­lar to ones printed in her cook­book Apron Free Cook­ing which is avail­able on the web­site www.apronfreecooking.com. She also writes a monthly col­umn at www.culinarychat.net

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Dec 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.