Fudge Cookies- Mint or Chocolate Cherry

One of my very favorite parts of the holiday season as a child was my mom’s cookies!

Not just the fact that they were (and still are) the very best cookies you will ever taste, but I enjoyed the whole process. I loved coming downstairs on a cold December day and the table would be cleared and then filled with empty cooling racks, cookies sheets and strips of waxed paper. You just knew that meant the cookie baking was about to begin! She would have tins lined up that were filled with more waxed paper or foil and as cookies cooled, all the tins would slowly start filling up.

Tins of cookies would go into school for all of our teachers regardless of how old we got (and sometimes we even went backwards and would still take them to teachers we had had years ago)! Taking my mom’s cookies in was a source of pride!

The other day, I started going through my recipes with my daughter and was letting her pick out some cookie ones that she wanted to make. There is an old church cookbook we have that is falling apart and all the pages are loose. She saw the title of the one recipe she wanted to make and then later saw that it was one submitted by my mom! She seriously couldn’t get over it! Later, I found that page of the cookbook on the dresser in her bedroom, and when I asked her what she was doing with it, she said, “Gramma’s famous! This needs to go in my scrapbook!”

P.S. the child has no scrapbook, but I do believe that Gramma should be famous for her cookies! : )

These are my favorite chocolate cookie base. They are so fudgy and really adaptable. They’re delicious plain, but you can also add chocolate chips, chopped nuts, peanut butter chips, or in this case Nestle Toll House DelightFulls!

I let my kids choose which ones they each wanted to try. I could have been over in the seafood aisle, and I still would have been able to accurately predict that my son would choose the dark chocolate mint-filled

and my daughter would choose the dark chocolate cherry-filled.

I did actually see her hover over the caramel-filled ones for a heartbeat, but I knew the cherry would win out! And I was glad because those flavors paired perfectly with the fudgy-base of our cookies!

Fudge Cookies- Mint or Chocolate Cherry

2/3 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2/3 sour cream
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cocoa powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
2 cups baking chips (we used Nestle Toll House DelightFulls mint-filled and cherry-filled)

Preheat over to 375. Spray cookie sheets with cooking spray.
In mixing bowl, cream shortening and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs and sour cream.
In small bowl, stir together flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt. Add to shortening mixture and mix well.
Add your baking chips and stir in. Drop dough by tablespoonfuls onto cookie sheets and bake until cookies are puffed and edges are set, about 9 minutes. Cool on cookie sheets and then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

Before we added our baking chips, we split our dough into 2 separate bowls. Then we added 1 cup of the mint-filled chips to one bowl and 1 cup of the cherry-filled chips to the other bowl. This way each of my kids had their own bowl of cookies and we got to try both flavors!

After they were cooled, we took some white candy melts and microwaved them at 30-second intervals until they were melted. Added a drop each of red and green food coloring to 2 different bowls and then drizzled over the cookies. This just helped us be able to tell them apart and made them look a little extra festive!

Totally not necessary, but just like with my Ho Ho Ho Christmas Cherry Pie it makes my kids smile so we took this extra step!

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