Chocolate Mint Chip Cookies!

I thought it was about time to resurrect this blob before it become another "one-hit-wonder". And what better way to do it than when some cookies I wanted to try out. My good friend Chere in Oregon sent me some pottery as a gift. So I agreed to make her something yummy involving chocolate and mint. I couldn't think of much that could survive a cross country trip in the mail. Cookies, seemed safest, chocolate maybe, but not in the heat of this summer in Texas.
 I ran across Andes Baking Chips in the grocery store one day and thought that would be perfect for some cookies to send to Chere! A few months later, with school out of the way, and a little more time, I thought I should probably get on the ball and at least experiment with something. These turned out pretty good, but I may change the recipe a bit for the final product.

 I didn't want to just throw the chips into any old chocolate chip cookie recipe, I thought a great chocolate cookie would carry them better. I looked through some of the books from school and adapted one out of a book from CIA (Culinary Institute of America), titled Master the Art and Craft of Baking and Pastry 2nd Edition. The ingredients are in weight measurements as that's how we learned to bake in our classes, makes for more consistent product. I didn't get any pictures of the process, but now I see that I should have, because this recipe started to scare me at first, but it came together in the end. The flour proportion to the rest of the recipe looked really off, as did the sugar. I substituted mint extract for the vanilla in the recipe, but it almost seems to overpower the chocolate too much, I will probably use less next time, or use vanilla as it was supposed to be. The adapted recipe is below.

Chocolate Mint Chip Cookies
Makes 80 2" cookies
Adapted from the Mudslide Cookies Recipe in the book mentioned above. 


2 1/2 oz. flour(I used All Purpose, the original used cake flour)

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder 

Pinch of salt

5 1/2 oz. unsweetened chocolate (5 1/2 baking squares) chopped

1 pound bittersweet chocolate, chopped

3 oz. butter

1 pound sugar

12 oz. eggs (approx 6 large eggs)

1 tsp. Mint extract

20 oz (2-10oz packages Andes Creme de Menthe Baking Chips

1. Line baking sheets with parchment paper and preheat oven to 350º.

2. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.

3. Over double boiler, melt chocolate and butter and stir until smooth. Cool slightly

4. Meanwhile, beat sugar, extract, and eggs on high with whip attachment until thick and light, about 6-8 minutes.

5. Blend in melted chocolate on medium speed until blended.

6. Blend in flour mixture until just incorporated. (This is where the recipe started to scare me. The mixture may resemble a thick cake batter at this point rather than a cookie dough.)

7. Blend in baking chips until evenly incorporated.

8. If dough still seems too loose, allow it to cool slightly as it will be easier to manage once the chocolate sets up more.

9. I used a #50 scoop and got about 80 cookies that were 2" wide. The original recipe says to weigh out 2 oz, of the dough to get 3 dozen. Scoop the dough into rows on the lined baking sheets about 2 inches apart. 

10. Bake for about 12 minutes until the tops are cracked, the inside may still look raw, but be careful not to overbake them.

11. They will still be very soft when they first come out of the oven. Allow them too cool slightly on pan before moving to wire racks to cool completely. Store at room temperature in an airtight container.

2011 That Takes the Cake-Cake and Sugar Art Show

This is my first post here, even though I've had the blog sitting for a little while. After spending 2 semesters learning from my Chef Instructor-Stephanie Herrington, she convinced me to enter the cake show in February. I had visited the show the previous year after starting my culinary classes. After seeing the cakes last year, I was pretty intimidated. I had never actually worked with fondant before, or made much of any decorated cakes. I had made simple home-style cakes that just basically had the frosting slapped on and possibly decorated with candies, sprinkles, crumbs or shredded coconut. In the fall semester of 2010, one of my classes was a cake baking and decorating class. We learned the basics of piping with icing, piping gel, and chocolate. Baking cakes of course, and working with sugar doughs such as fondant, gum paste, and marzipan. I found it's not nearly as intimidating as I thought. Chef Herrington told many of us in the class that we should enter the show. I gave it some thought and decided I would give it a shot.

 That Takes the Cake is a cake and sugar art show that takes place in Austin during the last weekend of February. This year was their 7th annual show and the theme was "Caked Crusaders". I contemplated entering a showpiece cake. The showpiece cakes had to represent the theme of the show with classic comic book heroes and villains. I decided timing with work, school and short notice, my skills weren't quite there yet, maybe next year. I did enter into the Culinary Student Wedding Cake division. There were over 400 entries in the cake show this year. I'm not sure I even had a chance to look at them all

I have always loved a black and white color scheme, so I decided to use that as the main color scheme of my cake. I drew out probably 10 designs, not to mention the ones that went through my head that didn't make it to paper. I decided I would use a dummy cake for this one so that I can keep it as a display. I shopped at All In One Bakeshop for most of my supplies and also bought a few things from Sugar Craft online. All In One carries the dummy cakes and I played around with different sizes and stacking orders, and decided on 9 tiers alternating between regular round shapes, and rounds with concave sides. 9 tiers? What was I thinking?! It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun as well. So from 30 pounds of fondant, smoothed over the foam, and cut into 308 diamonds and 88 strips. Plus 2 gum paste roses and who knows how many silver dragees. I ended up with the cake in the following picture. It's about 4 feet tall and the bottom tier is 18" to give you an idea of the size, so I repeat, "What was I thinking?!"

The following shot is a close up of one of the roses taken by Chris Wingler who put together a slide show of the winners in the cake show.

Close-up of rose. Photo taken by Chris Wingler

There is also a flickr group with pictures from the show submitted by many people. The slideshow is below

I am proud to say I got second place in my category. My friend and classmate Kristen Davenport of Sugar-Skull.com  also entered the cake show in the Vegan tasting category. She was very surprised when they called her name for first place! To say she was stoked is an understatement. Kristen took the picture to the right just after we received our awards at the show.


When I returned to class the following Monday, the instructor, Chef Brian Mccormick of the bread class I was in the beginning of this semester overheard me talking to one of the other students about the show. He saw my medal and asked what it was about. I explained to him about the show and how Kristen and I places. He was very happy but also surprised he hadn't heard anything about it from Chef Herrington. During the lab after that class, the Department Chair, Chef Sandra Pepper, came into the kitchen to congratulate me as well. Later on I emailed the above picture to Chef Mccormick, and Chef Pepper. That evening I got a phone call from Brette Lea, the Marketing  Director for ACC. I was asked to attend a photo shoot the following day with other students for an advertisement they are putting together. Here are a couple of behind the scenes shots from their facebook. They told me sometime in may is when we can expect to see the advertisement.