Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies
Friday, October 12, 2012 at 11:47AM | Taneasha 
I think we’ve just about exhausted the possibilities for mint chocolate chip desserts. Seeley has made ice cream and cake, and now I'm doing cookies. Ever since Hubby saw a picture of mint chocolate chip cookies online somewhere, he’s been wanting me to make them. More than the mint and chocolate, I think it was probably the green color that caught his attention. Initially, I had the fabulous idea of juicing mint leaves to use for coloring. As it turns out, mint leaves don’t produce green juice, it’s brown. Ok, perhaps not such a fabulous idea. I thought about using spinach instead, like I did when I made these colorful cookies, but I was afraid the idea of spinach in mint cookies might turn people off a bit. (Although, I can vouch for the fact that you can’t actually taste spinach juice in cookies.) Anyway, in the end, I broke down and bought some natural food coloring.
And for the mint flavor, I used this. It’s just peppermint oil mixed with sunflower oil.
Here’s what you’ll need:
- ½ cup butter
- ¾ cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 teaspoon peppermint flavoring
- Food coloring
- 1 ½ cups flour
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 1 cup chocolate chips
Cookies come together fairly quickly, so go ahead and preheat your oven to 350° before you begin. As usual, your ingredients need to be at room temperature. If you didn’t plan ahead, see what to do here. Drop your butter into a mixing bowl along with the sugar.
Whip them together until it becomes light in color and fluffy.
Add the egg.
Mix until the egg is completely incorporated, scraping everything down a time or two.
Add the vanilla and peppermint.
When those are incorporated, start adding your food coloring. If you’re using natural food coloring, it will take way more than the scary artificial stuff. I ended up using probably a teaspoon between the blue and yellow.
Continue to add a little at a time until you arrive at a color you’re happy with.
Add the flour, soda, powder, and salt.
Mix until that comes together, scraping everything down again, then add the chocolate chips. I took out a bit of my dough and added white chocolate chips because I love mint and white chocolate together. For the rest, I used dark chocolate. You’ll need a total of about 1 cup of whatever kind of chips you decide on.
Fold those into the dough.
Spoon balls of dough onto a parchment lined baking sheet, leaving plenty of space between them. Mine were probably about 2 tablespoons each, which make cookies that are something like 3 inches across.
Bake at 350° for 12 minutes or so. They should look dry on top and be starting to brown around the edges.
The cool peppermint flavor mixed with the warm chewy cookie and the creamy, gooeyness (yes, that’s a word) of the chocolate is a perfect combination.
As for the color, I think next time I’ll go with spinach. It really does give a better color than the food coloring.
What mint chocolate dessert have we missed that you’d like to see us make?
Reader Comments (2)
Just saw this. Yummy!
Am pinching this one for Christmas-thanks!