Fall recipes: Festive chocolate chip cookies

Festive chocolate chip cookies

Recently, we were planning to attend the birthday party of a youngster, and at the last minute we were asked to bring cookies, preferably chocolate chip. We make these all the time, but they are, frankly, kind of dull. How could we make them a bit more festive? After a bit of thought, and a trip to the store, we came up with the following modification to the basic recipe. We made some chocolate butter cream icing and piped a little onto each cookie, topping each one with a white chocolate chip. Since it was still early fall, there was still mint in the garden, and if mint is available, putting a mint leaf under the chocolate icing adds a bit of color and flavor.

The basic cookie recipe and icing recipe are given below. The basic recipe takes about 25 minutes from start to finish, even if you wash the dishes by hand. Icing the cookies may take another 10 minutes or so.

Festive chocolate chip cookies

Ingredients:

• 6 Tb brown sugar
• 6 Tb white sugar
• ½ cup shortening
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp water
• 1 cup flour
• ½ tsp baking soda
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• ½ cup chopped pecans or walnuts
• 18 white chocolate chips
• Fresh mint leaves, if available
• Chocolate butter cream frosting

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. (If you use a convection oven, set it to 350 degrees). Put the brown and white sugars to a bowl and add the shortening and egg. Mix vigorously with a wire whisk until smooth.
2. Add the vanilla and water and mix.
3. Add the flour, soda and salt and mix in with a wooden spoon.
4. Stir in the chocolate chips and nuts.
5. Grease a cookie sheet with butter or spray shortening and drop rounded spoonfuls of batter onto the sheet.
6. Bake for 8-1/2 to 9 minutes. The cookies should be brown but not completely dry.
7. Remove the cookies to a cutting board to cool while you bake the remaining cookies. Makes about 18 cookies.

Butter cream frosting
The recipe below makes more than enough icing for the 18 cookies. However, if you are using the icing for a cake, you want to use a whole stick of butter (1/4 pound) and a whole box of powdered sugar (1 pound).

• ¼ cup butter
• ½ pound confectioner’s (powdered) sugar
• Milk
• 1 or 2 1-oz squares of semisweet chocolate

1. Place the butter and sugar in a food processor and pulse until uniform.
2. Add milk slowly until smooth. It usually takes only a few tablespoons of milk.
3. Melt the chocolate in a small glass container in a microwave for about 30-40 seconds.
4. Add the melted chocolate to the icing in the food processor and mix until uniform.

Assembly
Place one or two small mint leaves on each cooled cookie. Put the icing into a pastry bag, making sure it is thin enough to pipe through a decorative tip. Pipe a medium sized dot onto each cookie, partly covering the mint leaves. (The mint leaves will shrivel up over time, although the flavor will remain, so it is best to use them if you will be serving them the same day.)

Place a single white chocolate morsel on top of the icing dot. Allow the icing to set before putting the cookies into a storage container.