My New Christmas Cookie

For the past couple of weeks, I have been baking for both Christmas and Hanukkah...basically my dinning room table and kitchen look like...Christmakuh!

these are my chocolate covered oreo's drizzled in crushed candy canes:

I need to bake cookies for a bake sale that is raising money for charity, that's the easy part...the hard part for me is always, what to bake that I haven't already made a hundred times already. There are my tried and true recipes that my family and friends love like s'mores bars, cake balls, chocolate cream cupcakes or whoopie pies...but if I only make that, then there wouldn't be anything for me to post. 

So today, I decided to try and be creative and "wing it" without a recipe to see what happens...I want to make a Christmas Cookie but not a cut out sugar cookie...

I went through the bunch of supplies and ingredients we had on hand and started to group things together to figure out what to make...

White Chocolate Chips and Ghiardelli Peppermint Bark Squares...

Candy Canes...

Mint Flavored Hot Chocolate..

and then an idea came to me for a new type of cookie...

and look how pretty it came out:

Not sure what to call it but basically it's a...

White Chocolate, Peppermint Bark Cookie

and it tasted so good, soft, chewy, minty with just the right amount of chocolate!  I can't believe I ate the whole thing in like 2 seconds...

Getting started...Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and lightly spray 2 cookie sheets with cooking spray like Pam.

Use paddle attachment blade for mixer and speaking of blades...

Check out this new blade we just got for our mixer...you see our original paddle attachment blades were so worn out that the white coating was peeling off which couldn't be good for my cookies. We found this one during a visit to Chef Central...

It scrapes the bowl while you mix...how Awesome is that!

Place 1/2 cup (1 stick) of softened butter and 1 cup packed light brown sugar (for chewy-ness) and 4 tablespoons of granulated sugar into mixer fitted with paddle attachment.  Mix until fluffy, about 30 seconds.

add 1 large egg and 2 teaspoons of Vanilla extract, mix for another 30 seconds or until all combined until...

it looks like this-ish

Now for the dry ingredients...

in separate bowl, sift together 1 3/4 cups of flour and 1/2 teaspoon of each of these...Baking powder, baking soda and salt...

with mixer on low speed, slowly add flour mixture to sugar/butter mixture until well combined.

add 1 1/2 teaspoons of mint hot chocolate to mixture...

and mix by hand until well combined.

add 1 cup of chopped peppermint bark

and 3/4 cup of white chocolate chips

 

mix by hand and with 1/3 cup measuring cup, scoop onto prepared cookie sheet.

these will be very large cookies, about 6 to a cookie sheet and only make about 1 dozen total...but you can make them any size you want, just adjust the baking time.

bake for about 22-24 minutes until the edges begin to brown but not the tops for a softer, chewy cookie, which is how I like them...bake a bit longer for a crisper cookie.

yum, but we're not done yet....

for extra yummy-ness, melt some white chocolate bark and drizzle on top of cookie

and crush up a candy cane ...

 

and sprinkle crushed candy canes on top before the chocolate melts.

I wrapped them up individualy in pretty plastic bags:

 

Hope you get a chance to make these delicious cookies and let me know what you think - they go perfect with a hot steamy cup of mint hot chocolate for Santa too!

If you want to host a charity bake sale, this is one I am planning on participating in shortly:  Great American Bake Sale

With love and cupcakes

Cookteen