Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies

This year I had intended to make chai-spiced sugar cookies for my friends' annual holiday cookie swap. Then I changed my mind when I got to the grocery store and realized that the spices I needed were going to cost me $20. We've been trying to stick to a grocery budget since we bought our house, and somehow it didn't seem fair to purchase expensive spices when I won't let John buy his $4-per-can San Marzano tomatoes anymore (o, the sacrifices we've made). Luckily, I had just about everything I needed for these cookies already in my pantry.

Mexican hot chocolate has cinnamon in it, and often some chile pepper to add an extra kick. The chile powder is optional in this recipe, but if you do want to add some heat, make sure you're using chile (with an "e") and not chili (with an "i") powder. It's an important distinction. I omitted the chile powder, but I thought the cinnamon added nice warmth to these cookies without being overpowering. They're basically chocolate snickerdoodles.

Give these a try--they'll make a nice addition to your holiday cookie plate. If you're looking for other cookie recipes, check out last year's Christmas cookie posts:

Holiday Cookie Madness
Cookie Dough Truffles

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

Last month, John and I spent a relaxing weekend in Lancaster County, PA (also known as "Amish Country"). In addition to horse-drawn buggies, bonnets, and towns with oddly suggestive names (Intercourse and Blue Ball.... haha), Lancaster County is also home to the Wilbur Chocolate Factory. It was at this wonderful place that I picked up two beautiful bags of chocolate chips. One bag of chips ended up in my Samoa Bars, and the other sat in the pantry, waiting for their higher calling. That calling came on Saturday when I clicked over to the Cook's Illustrated website, where these Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies were a featured recipe.

The cool thing about this recipe is that you melt the butter, so you don't have to wait around for your butter to come to room temperature like with most cookie recipes. You actually have to melt it and cook it until it's just brown... then you whisk it with sugar to form a delightful caramel-y base for your cookies. 

 While calling them "perfect" might be overstating things a bit (I still have yet to find the "perfect" chocolate chip cookie), I would say that these cookies are pretty fantastic. Thick, chewy, and a little crispy around the edges... how can you go wrong?

Samoa Bars

 

Still waiting for your Girl Scout Cookie order to come in? I'm all for supporting the Girl Scouts (I used to be one!), but sometimes I need more immediate cookie gratification. I spied this recipe on another cooking blog, and was pretty excited to try making my own version of Samoas (sometimes they're also called Caramel DeLites). Samoas are little round cookies topped with toasted coconut and caramel, then drizzled with chocolate.

While these aren't difficult to make, they do take a lot of time due to all of the steps involved (luckily there have been a lot of snowy days spent indoors lately). You have to make each layer of these bars separately, so most of the prep time is spent waiting for things to set, cool, etc. These bars replicate the flavors of the Samoas really well. The one change I would make next time is to use a little less of the cookie crust. I felt that these needed a higher caramel to cookie crust ratio in order to be perfect. I'm posting the original recipe, but play around with the amounts as you like. Also, the recipe calls for "good" caramels... the only ones I could find were made by Kraft. They melted nicely and tasted awesome, so I'm going to say that they easily qualify as "good". Don't knock yourself out looking for anything fancy.

Cookie Dough Truffles

Who even needs to bake cookies when you can just take chocolate chip cookie dough and dip it in chocolate?  And there are no eggs in the dough, so you can eat as much as you want without worry (I say this as if the presence of raw eggs has ever stopped me from stuffing my face with gobs of cookie dough). I made these for my friends' holiday cookie swap later today, so I think they'll be a nice variation from the peanut butter blossoms that I usually make.

These are easy to do, if a little time-consuming. I refrigerated my dough overnight, which made it much easier to work with the next day (it was too sticky right after making it). I used my fondue pot to melt the chocolate, which worked out nicely since I don't own the double-boiler that the recipe calls for. Trader Joe's was out of their mega-bars of milk chocolate, so I coated these in dark chocolate. I also toasted my pecans to give them a little bit of extra flavor.

Christmas Cookie Madness

You can't even fathom the amount of cookies my mom and I baked yesterday. I was visiting my parents for the weekend, and mom enlisted my help in making cookies to give away as Christmas gifts. I think my mom just wanted to practice being an amazing cookie-baking grandma for my niece, Laura, who was born the morning after our baking fiesta. :)

Just how many cookies did we make? Well, mom has a double oven, which really increased our cookie-producing power. After about 7 hours and 15 sticks of butter (top that, Paula Deen!), we'd created eight different kinds of cookies.

For your Christmas cookie-making enjoyment, six of those recipes are included in this post:

    * Peanut Butter Blossoms
    * Cream Cheese Cookies
    * Chocolate Mint Cookies
    * Bethal Bars
    * Holiday Thumbprint Cookies
    * Caramel-Filled Chocolate Cookies