Hi! What did you think of the first edition of the Blog-idays? I enjoyed it, and I think I’ll be continuing it through the next month. For today, I compiled a baking post, since I’ve recently gotten into baking. ‘Tis The Season For Baking! Winter is a good time to make cookies and have a cup of cocoa with it to warm up from the cold outside. I love to make cocoa after school or before I go to bed, it’s just a nice thing to have every once in awhile. When I stumbled upon Hot Chocolate Cookies, I naturally had to test them out. They are so good, they’re pretty much heaven. They are so good, that when I baked them and people were coming over, I grabbed a jar and hid, I mean saved, ten cookies so they didn’t eat all of them! I’m warning you, you’ll fall in love.

Below I’ve listed the full original recipe*, with the modifications we made when I baked them.

*Not my recipe. I adapted it from The Girl Who Ate Everything.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter – at room temperature
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2/3 cups brown sugar – packed
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 (1-oz) packages hot chocolate – not sugar free. I used Swiss Miss packets, some with mini marshmallows already in it, and it was delicious.
• 1-1/4 teaspoons salt
• 1-1/4 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 cup milk chocolate chips
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips – I used just 2 cups of semi-sweet chips because I forgot milk chocolate chips, and they tasted fine. Whichever kind you have available are fine in my opinion.
• 1 1/2 cups mini marshmallows, frozen – I did not freeze my marshmallows. Supposedly, it helps so that they don’t melt out of the cookies, but it’s fine to not freeze yours.

Directions:

• Cream butter and sugars until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla until combined.
• In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, hot chocolate mix, salt and baking soda. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients slowly until incorporated. The dough will be thick.
• Fold in the milk and semi-sweet chips. Chill the dough for an hour. Chilling the dough allows the ingredients to blend and also makes a thicker cookie.
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
• Make balls of dough, around 1 1/2 tablespoons each, and place onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Hand place the marshmallows in the cookies. Although I have a pic of folding them in, I’ve found this is the best way. Make sure to tuck the marshmallow inside the balls if you can so that you don’t have marshmallows sticking to your pan. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until edges are golden brown. The cookies will still look soft. They will continue to cook as they cool. Let cool for 5 minutes before removing from pan. I love these warm. If your eating them after they have cooled you can warm them in the microwave for 10 seconds.