What’s more seasonal than peppermint? I’m actually not sure when or why that association began. Round peppermint candies are available year-round, but it seems like candy canes only show up for Christmas.
I had a holiday party coming up and was looking for cookies to fit. Continuing to work through The Cookie Connection, I found this recipe for Chocolate Peppermint Cookies with crushed peppermint sprinkled over the top and made a ton of cookies.
As usual, I first assembled all of the ingredients. Three sticks of butter and three eggs sounds like a lot, but the recipe was supposed to be big.
This recipe did call for creaming the butter and sugar in the stand mixer.
Despite the volume, my mixer had no problem working through it. I suspect I actually remembered to take the butter out of the fridge early to soften since I don’t see it cut into chunks above.
I had to scrape and beat the eggs in longer than usual so that they didn’t separate and curdle.
Since there was a significant amount of cocoa powder in addition to the flour, I did mix my dry ingredients separately. However, I wasn’t diligent enough to sift the cocoa powder, too.
Before incorporating the dry ingredients, I finished up with my chocolate. The recipe called for milk chocolate. I had a few, but not enough, left over. However, this Easter Bunny was willing to join Christmas this year as well.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the bunny was hollow, so its contribution was minimal. I ended up adding semi-sweet chips to make the desired amount.
All of this went into the mixer. The dough quickly darkened with the cocoa powder, and it was quite firm. There were some streaks left, but I left them to avoid over-mixing.
The recipe called for chilling the dough, so I stuck it a bowl for the fridge.
For the peppermint topping, I unwrapped enough candy canes and put them into a ziplock bag. I grabbed my tapered rolling pin and just whacked the bag until they were in pieces.
I apparently didn’t take too many pictures through baking. Based on the times, I suspect I again was baking because the oven was hot, so I was supposed to be sitting down for dinner while I was going back and forth to the kitchen.
The already firm dough was quite hard after chilling. Despite the additional effort required to scoop, they turn out just fine. They baked as shown in the pictures, too.
The peppermint is sprinkled on after baking. The upside is that it doesn’t melt. The trick, however, is that the cookie isn’t quite as sticky, so the peppermint tends to go everywhere.
Overall, we thought these cookies were fine. For chocolate mint, we actually liked Sarah Kieffer’s Chocolate Sugar Cookies with Mint more, but no one complained at the party.
And the plate was empty by the end of the night
If you want more chocolate and peppermint on your holiday menu, you can find the recipe on Bake from Scratch.