Chocolate Mint Cookies

Sometimes you need the refreshment of mint and chocolate together. The Girl Scouts have built a cookie empire on this idea (as far as I’m concerned the Thin Mint is the KING (or, I guess QUEEN) of Girl Scout Cookies. Truly nothing else matches them.

But sometimes you want to try and make things at home and that’s where these come in. They’re not a copycat of the Thin Mints, but they’re in the same neighborhood, and they are delicious.

Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

· 1 cup flour

· ½ cup sweetened cocoa powder

· ½ t salt

· ½ t baking powder

· 6 T butter, softened to room temperature

· 1 cup sugar

· 1 egg

· 1 t vanilla

Icing

· 1 bag (12 oz) semisweet chocolate chips

· ¼ t vanilla

· ¼ t peppermint extract

Directions

Of course, we’ll start with the cookies.

Throw your dry ingredients (flour, cocoa, salt and baking powder) into a bowl and whisk until well combined. Set that aside.

In a second bowl, mix the butter and sugar with your hand mixer until the mixture is light and fluffy, probably a couple minutes. Then, add in the egg and vanilla and mix again until well combined.

Take your flour and cocoa mixture and add that to the wet ingredients and mix well.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for about an hour (though overnight is ok too – though you probably don’t want to do it too much longer than that or the dough will start to get stale).

When you’re ready to bake, place dough (about a tablespoon full) on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper, 6 cookies to a sheet. Press them with the heel of your hand so they’re flattened a bit – like this:

Bake at 350 for about 8 minutes or so, until the bottom of the cookies start to look done. Transfer the cookies to a wire rack and let them cool completely.

Store them in an airtight container until you’re ready to do the icing.

The icing is pretty simple, though you do need to actually pay attention (not always a skill of mine, so I feel like I need to say that).

In a small microwaveable bowl, put the semisweet chocolate chips, vanilla and peppermint extract. Put it in the microwave for 15 seconds, and then take it out and stir. Continue doing this, in 15 second intervals, until the chips are almost all melted. Once you get to that point, take the bowl out of the microwave and stir vigorously until the remaining chips are all melted.

Now, there are a couple ways to cover the cookies in the chocolate. The easiest (and therefore my favorite), is to just take a corner of the cookie in your fingertip and dip the rest of it into the chocolate. You will end up with a small portion that does not have icing on it, but do what I do and say it’s a design choice to make them look fancier. Cuz they kinda do.

Place a sheet of wax paper onto a cookie sheet and place each dipped cookie onto it. Since you’re not baking anymore, they can be pretty close together. Put the sheet in the fridge for a half hour to an hour and let the chocolate harden, then transfer the cookies to an airtight container.