Peppermint Patty Cookies

Still inspired by having seen Mari last week, and finding a little time on my hands at home this afternoon, I decided to embark on a cookie experiment in honor of her. She loves York Peppermint Patties. As do I. Thanks to Mari me, my baby's first food was actually York Peppermint Patty, but I'll save that story for another time.

When I was with Mari last week, she made Monster cookies. We didn't have any M&Ms on hand, though the cookies did not suffer as a result. But it got me thinking: M&Ms are fine and all, but there are all kinds of similar candies you could use. M&Ms, Reese's Pieces, hey wait! Aren't there York Pieces?! The wheels were already turning. 

I decided to put my idea to the test and see if some York Peppermint Patty cookies could work. I had made chocolate peppermint cookies at Christmas, and while the peppermint was delish, the cookie vehicle for the peppermint was only so-so. Not as much chocolatey flavor as I wanted. But at least I had a head start on how to make that combo even better and incorporate these York pieces. 

I used Mark Bittman’s excellent Chocolate-Chocolate Chunk cookies, with the following changes:

Instead of the 1 ounce each semisweet & unsweetened chocolate, I decided to use 1 oz. of a Theo dark chocolate mint bar that was in my Christmas stocking and 1 oz semi-sweet dutch processed cocoa. Why the substitution? Two reasons. One, I had the Theo bar on hand and it would've taken me a year to eat the whole thing, so I'd been looking for a way to use it. And since it had mint, I figured it would be a way to balance the York Pieces I would be using in lieu of chocolate chips. And two, though I did want some hint o' minty in the cookie itself, I also wanted it to have a richly chocolatey base. And I knew from an America's Test Kitchen episode that they had extracted extra chocolatey flavor in their chocolate cookies by using dutch processed cocoa. (As always, the tipping point of the decision was that I had it on hand, too).

The other substitution was instead of 2 cups of chocolate chunks, I used 1 c. of the York Pieces and 1 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips. I decided to start with 1 of each because I wanted to do this as a test run to see just how choco-minty these cookies turned out to be so that I could tweak the recipe as needed for the future. By using only 1 c of the York Pieces, I could save the rest for a future iteration of this recipe. And you can never go wrong tossing in a few chocolate chips in a chocolate cookie. Side note: the York Pieces are yummy, but NOWHERE NEAR as delectable as the real thing. Stick to the real thing. Preferably the snack size, which have the ultimate ratio of dark chocolate to minty goodness. Ok, back to the cookies.

The cookies turned out pretty damn near spot on. The York Pieces don't bake quite as well as I'd like - the dye on the Pieces bleeds a bit, and there's not a whole lot I can do about that. The cookie has almost exactly the right amount of rich chocolate without being overpoweringly dense, the chocolate chips are nice little gems of melted chocolatey goo hidden in the cookie crumb, and the Pieces (along with the Theo mint chocolate) provide the minty flavor I wanted. 

The bad news is (1) I didn't have this really kick ass cookie scoop that Mari has, so dropping the heaped tablespoons onto the cookie sheet has suddenly become a total drag. And (2) making the Peppermint Patty cookies doesn't make me miss Mari any less. Though these cookies might be good enough to momentarily distract me from that.