Chocolate Mint Sandwich Cookies

Hello from the middle of the week! We all need a little pick me up on Wednesdays, right? Well here’s a pile of freshly chopped chocolate for your viewing pleasure:

mmm…you can almost feel the endorphin rush...

In my last weekend links post, I shared a link to a Martha Stewart recipe for chocolate mint sandwiches. They are dark chocolate cookie wafers with a mint-infused ganache, enrobed in dark chocolate. Sort of like if a Thin Mint left the Girl Scouts, went to college and got a job working for a fashion magazine. Fancy.

Anyway, I couldn’t get them out of my mind, so I tried it. I’m not going to post the recipe (you can get it here) but here are some more photos from afternoon in the kitchen. Thank you Jami for taking these for me!

After you chill the dough, the recipe calls for rolling it out to 1/8” thickness and then using a cookie cutter to make perfectly round wafers but this is real life and ain’t nobody got time for that so instead I made two (mostly) even logs and then thinly sliced them into (mostly) even cookies. 

In my kitchen, taste trumps appearance so things like "evenly shaped" and "pretty" don't carry much weight.

While the cookies were cooling, it was time to make the ganache in the double boiler. Oh ganache, you wonderfully indulgent creature. Chocolate, heavy cream, and peppermint extract. Like, we're not even going to pretend there's anything healthy about that.

Time to dollop. Dollop, dollop.

What a fun word.

Aaand sandwich.

(I know, I should be a hand model, for real though.)

The final step, dipping them in melted dark chocolate. Here’s where it got weird. I used Ghiradelli chips with just a tiny smidgen of oil to make it more smooth and liquid-y but it wasn’t working out. It was too thick and awkward to evenly coat all the cookies. I ended up spooning it out and I ran out of chocolate halfway through. So they do not look like Martha’s picture.

That Martha, she just sets the bar so high!

The next day, after chilling in the refrigerator. Like I said, taste over style is what I’m all about.

A few notes on this recipe: make sure you use peppermint extract and NOT mint extract (which is actually a blend of peppermint and spearmint oil).  I grabbed the wrong bottle at the grocery store and in my opinion, it made a huge difference in taste. (It was almost the flavor of toothpaste, ick.) Second, the quality of the chocolate you use directly affects the quality of the dessert you produce. If you wouldn’t eat it plain, don’t bake with it. (The same rule applies to cooking with alcohol, incidentally.) For those of you in Texas, I would highly recommend Guittard. It is amazing quality and you can get it at H.E.B. 

I broke my own rule and used a box of Baker’s squares and the whole taste was just off to me. Call me a snob, but after living on Swiss chocolate for all those months, it's hard to compromise. And life is just too short to eat bad chocolate! So, if I make these again, I will do it with better ingredients. 

As I made this a couple of weeks ago, these are long gone but I already have another baking project in mind for Valentine's Day. So stay tuned and eat some chocolate today, ok?