You Can Never Have Too Much Chocolate + Mint for the Holidays: Chocolate Mint Sugar Cookies

I love the pairing of chocolate and mint any time, but it's one of my go-to flavor combinations during the holidays. My holiday cookie selection actually included three different chocolate-mint cookies: Yossy Arefi's Stamped Brownie Cookies; Mollie Katzen's Chocolate Chip-Mint Cookies (a long-standing favorite I have been making for the past 20 years); and Sarah Kieffer's Chocolate Mint Sugar Cookies. While I love Kieffer's pan-banging cookies, I've already gone through almost all of the pan-banging recipes in 100 Cookies, so I decided to try her non-pan-banging chocolate sugar cookie. She suggests several variations on the recipe, including a chocolate-mint version that's as easy as adding peppermint extract.

 

To make the cookie dough, you beat softened butter with sugar until light and fluffy; add an egg, an egg yolk, vanilla, and peppermint extract; and mix in the dry ingredients (flour, Dutch cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt), You can bake the cookies immediately. I used a #24 scoop to portion out the dough (getting 22 cookies per batch) and rolled each cookie in sugar before baking.

These cookies were beautiful -- comfortably thick and sturdy, with attractive cracks on top and an eye-catching sparkle from the sugar coating. Mine looked exactly like the cookies in the cookbook photo. And they were delicious -- very chocolate-y, refreshingly minty, and satisfyingly chewy. I would be curious to add chocolate chips and do a side-by-side comparison against Mollie Katzen's chocolate chip-mint cookie; I think the chocolate chips in the Katzen's cookie are a distinctive feature that really enhance the cookie's texture and flavor. But I was very happy with the way that these cookies turned out and would absolutely make them again.  

 

Recipe: "Chocolate Mint Sugar Cookies [variation of Chocolate Sugar Cookies]" from 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer, available here at Food52.