Many times I have tried and semi-succeeded in making chocolate cookies dipped in melted minty chocolate.

Thanks to a colleague scoping out different products when she visits the US and kindly bringing them back for me to try, I had a bag of Andes chocolate mint baking bits. (If you, like me, do not live somewhere that such a product is readily available, you can always get some whole Andes mints or After Eight mints, which are much easier to find in northern Europe and break them into little pieces.)

Chocolate and mint can be a very popular flavor combination, so I decided I might as well make some chocolate-mint cookies that do not involve the rigmarole of the aforementioned chocolate-dipped cookies.

I do not have a foolproof chocolate-based cookie (something similar in theory to basic chocolate chip cookies dough), so I decided to try out a recipe that I was going to make for Halloween… a chocolate cookie that could then be formed into a black cat face, decorated with candy corn and red hots. Naturally this did not happen because I cannot find candy corn on a regular basis and cannot find red hots at all. The recipe, though, seemed simple and like exactly what I wanted.

Chocolate cookies with Andes mint baking pieces

1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar (I used slightly less)
2 whole eggs
3 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour (I used 2.5 cups instead, to make this dough a little less stiff)
1 cup cocoa (I used slightly more to make this a bit more chocolaty)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 bag of Andes mint baking pieces (or broken up pieces of other chocolate mint candy)

Preheat oven to 350F/175-180C.

Mix butter and sugar well. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda; gradually add dry mixture to the creamed mixture. Mix in the mint candy. Roll dough into small balls. Place on parchment-lined baking sheets.

Bake at 350°F (about 175-180C) for 10-12 minutes or until cookies are set. Remove from the oven, let sit for a few minutes, remove to racks to cool.

The recipe seems to have worked perfectly. Only tomorrow will the real test occur (taste test in the office)!

(Many apologies once more for the (lack of) quality of the pictures.)