(Thin) Mint Condition

Half in the bag on mulled wine, we decided to make our own Thin Mints. A few notes on the recipe: as noted in multiple comments on the original site, the recipe as given seems to turn out very dry. (Admission: I used regular butter, powdered sugar, cocoa, and peppermint, mostly bulk from Aldi's, and I can't say I think it would make a difference to go the pricey/organic route on these.) Making half a batch as I was, I cut the flour from 3/4 of a cup to 1/2. (Making a full batch, 1 cup would probably be plenty.) Second, the cocoa flavor does wind up being a tad strong, so I made it a spare 1/2 cup of cocoa and a generous 1/2 cup of powdered sugar. I also ended up baking the cookies closer to 12 minutes and they were still just a little soft. As the author does, I improvised a double-boiler for melting the chocolate, using a nonstick pan on top of a simmering pot of water.

Ah, the chocolate: one of our favorite finds at Trader Joe's today was the broken hunks of Ghiradelli chocolate--about a half-pound hunk of pure semisweet for just over a buck. We got one for eating and two for cooking, so one of those was what we melted for dipping. We didn't have any trouble with the texture, so no need to add cream or oil as some others apparently did. The peppermint, I would recommend titrating by taste.

We also don't have cookie cutters, so we cut them out with shotglasses per yet another suggestion. It worked like a charm. Absolutely the perfect size!

Here are the chocolate cookies just out of the oven:
The melting chocolate:
And the finished product:
Start to finish, just under an hour. They were fun and really quite easy; aside from making the dough in the KitchenAid, which I wouldn't have had to, no special equipment required whatsoever. Also, besides the peppermint extract, which I think most people have on hand anyway, it was pretty much all stuff that we already had in the kitchen.

I highly recommend!