Yesterday was
the Adam Ezra Group's Ramble (which was, by the by, awesome), and as last year there was a bake-off (with cookies for free to anyone, and you put money into the jars of the cookies you liked the best, all proceeds going to charities to help feed the hungry). Determined to impress, I made not one but four different batches of cookies: traditional oatmeal raisin, triple chocolate cranberry, my spicy ginger cookies, and an experiment...
Peppermint Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/2 teaspoon cloves
* 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
* 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine
* 3/4 cup white sugar
* 3/4 cup brown sugar
* 2 large eggs
* 2 teaspoons peppermint extract
* 1/2 teaspoon green food coloring (utterly optional. apparently the green color, which I'd added to make the cookies more visually distinctive, turned out to be a bit of a turnoff for some would-be cookie eaters.)
* 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
Method
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Combine flour, cloves, nutmeg, coriander, baking powder, and salt together in a medium bowl. Mix well and set aside.
3. Beat butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar in a mixer until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition, then add peppermint extract. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased baking sheets.
4. Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 - 3 minutes, remove to wire racks to cool completely.
Aside from uncertainty over the color of the cookies (which is why I say the addition of the food coloring is completely optional), these were generally well received. People said, and my experience with a test cookie matches, that they ended up tasting pleasantly like Thin Mints.
(And on a side note, although I didn't get recognized as having one of my batches raise the most contributions -- I came in a close third -- I'm quite happy that the combination of all four different batches just around tripled what anyone else's single batch did. All in all, I'm quite happy with that, particularly since the proceeds all go to charity. *wry smile* )
Originally crossposted from
http://kitchenklutz.dreamwidth.org/14979.html. Please comment here if you first read the post here.