Mix it Up Monday: Christmas Cookies Part 1

So this is super dorky, but while I was deciding what to bake for Christmas, I thought I would like to do cookies with three different "holiday" flavors. So I picked nutmeg, peppermint and cranberry. For the nutmeg, I made the Brown Sugar Sugar Cookies from Halloween. Same cookie, with a little more nutmeg and cut out into Christmas shapes. John says they remind him of eggnog...that sounds about right. Today I made the peppermint cookies. Let me give a little history behind this cookie first though. When I was younger, probably about middle school age, I baked the chocolate chip cookies for Christmas. Everything was perfect, except there was an unusual flavor to the cookies. We finally figured out that I had used peppermint extract in place of the vanilla extract. Since my family is so kind and loving, this story never comes up for fear of causing undo embarrassment...yeah, right. So this year I am revisiting the Peppermint Chocolate Chip Cookies - but intentionally this time. I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, so I kind of winged it, but they turned out pretty good. I used the basic Toll House Cookies recipe from the back of the chocolate chip bag. I left out the nuts and added peppermint extract and crushed candy canes. The peppermint flavor is, I think, very subtle. If you wanted to you could make it stronger by increasing the amount of extract and/or candy canes. You could also use Andes Mints, although they are not really peppermint. I also an almost empty bag of chocolate chips in the fridge, so I added those...no point in perfectly good chocolate just sitting around. I probably ended up with about 2 1/4c. of chocolate chips. It is hard to see in the pictures, but the cookies have small red flecks from the candy canes and some have holes where the candy melted. The recipe also made a ton of cookies - close to 7 doz, not counting what Hollis managed to eat before they were baked. I froze a little more the 5 doz along with the sugar cookies for our trip to Columbus and then for Christmas next week.
Stay tuned next week for the cranberry cookies!

I threw away the chocolate chip bag with the recipe on the back, so here is a link to the recipe. To make these Peppermint Chocolate Chip Cookies omit the nuts and add 1 tsp of peppermint extract (more if desired) and about 1/4 c of crushed candy canes.