{recipe} peppermint chocolate chip cookies

Look at how cute those cookies look underneath our baby Christmas tree. :) 

I love holiday baking. Even though I am (always) an incredibly messy baker, there is just something so comforting about making homemade cookies.  Especially when baking falls on a cold, cloudy day with candles burning and the Christmas music channel on TV blaring. 

I first saw the recipe for these cookies on Pinterest. (duh) My cookies look nothing like the cookies on the original blog. She baked hers in muffin top pans. Totally genius. However, I do not own muffin top pans, nor do I have room in my tiny apartment to store them. Therefore I was forced to bake them normal style - on some parchment paper in a cookie pan. My candy canes and junior mints melted and formed little sticky ice skating rinks under the cookies. After the first batch I sent some cookies in the oven without rolling them in the candy canes to prevent the sticky meltage. I tried to spruce them up by pressing some crushed candy cane on top of the cookies as soon as they came out of the oven. They weren't as (unconventionally) pretty. I decided to just go with it and let the sticky cookies do their thing.

Moral of the story - own a muffin top pan so you can make perfectly shaped peppermint chocolate chip cookies. But if you don't mind serving some irregularly shaped cookies to your guests, don't be surprised when they disappear in like... twenty minutes.

These cookies were a hit! Sticky mess and all. :)

Peppermint Chocolate Chip Cookies
Recipe credit to Two Peas & Their Pod.

Ingredients:

• 3 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (two sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
• 2 boxes (3.5 ounce) Junior Mints. (Original recipe calls for peppermint crunch Junior Mints but I couldn't find them at the store I bought the rest of my ingredients at so I just used normal Junior Mints.)
• 6 large candy canes, crushed

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugars together until smooth. (It will be crumbly.) Beat in eggs and vanilla until well combined. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Stir in the chocolate chips.
3. Tuck 1 Junior Mint into about 1 tablespoon of cookie dough. Form into a ball and roll into crushed candy cane pieces. Place cookies on baking sheet.
4. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until edges just start to turn golden brown. Cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

Cookies on the left were rolled in candy canes. Cookies on the right were not.
I like the ones on the left better!

Light a Yankee "Cookies for Santa" candle, pour some milk into a penguin mug, and enjoy!