Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies!

Looks ordinary, but tastes different!

Back to the basics this week! It has been a pretty tiring week so far, so I decided to make simple - but delicious! - chocolate chip cookies.

But knowing me, I couldn't just make plain old chocolate chip cookies. I always want to do something a little different. Browsing Pinterest last night, the perfect cookie jumped out at me: mint chocolate chip cookies!

Mint chocolate chip is my favorite ice cream flavor of all time, so why not make a cookie version of it? I love taking one typical flavor of a dessert and converting it into another form of dessert.

The recipe is pretty simple - similar to my favorite chocolate chip salted caramel cookies, I add extra brown sugar and an extra egg yolk to keep the cookies soft. Unfortunately for me, I was running low on brown sugar today, so there was more white than brown sugar. They still turned out pretty soft and chewy though!

For the mint flavor, the linked recipe above uses Andes Mint Chocolates, which I did use too, but I also added a bit of mint extract to give it an extra boost of yummy minty-ness!

Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies (makes ~24 cookies)
Ingredients: 

• 1/2 cup of unsalted butter at room temperature
• 1/2 cup of dark brown sugar
• 3/4 cup of white sugar
• 1 egg + 1 extra egg yolk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp mint extract
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 and 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp Hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 packs of Andes Mints (chopped up, about 2 cups)

Steps: 

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix butter and sugars together with hand mixer until creamed. 
3. Mix in egg and egg yolk, followed by vanilla and mint extracts
4. Mix dry ingredients (baking soda, baking powder, salt, flour, cocoa) together, separate from the wet mixture. Mix half of the dry mixture with the wet until combined, followed by the other half of the dry mixture. 
5. Stir the mints in by hand. 
6. Form balls (~1 tablespoon) and bake for 12 minutes. Pull from the oven and let cool for 2 minutes in the pan, and then transfer to another plate to cool. 
7. EAT THEM ALL!