Tasty Bites: Double Chocolate Peppermint Chunk Cookies and Kiss Pies

By Beth V

If you are like me, the Christmas season presents a great opportunity to try a couple of new cookie recipes to supplement the old tried and true varieties. I stumbled upon two recently that were not only delicious-sounding, but also really cute visually, and pretty easy to pull off. One had a chewy, fudgy cookie with a melted peppermint/white chocolate Hershey’s Kiss melted on top. What a delicious flavor combination! The other uses refrigerated pie crust cut into circles and sealed around a Hershey’s kiss creating adorable little hand-held “kiss pies.” A recipe with less than five ingredients? Sure, why not supplement more complicated baking with something so easy and cute? I did find some delicious Mint Truffle kisses for my “kiss pies,” but my local stores were out of the peppermint-striped Candy Cane Kisses, so I was happy to find these delicious Andes Peppermint Crunch baking chips and I set to work creating my own version.

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Tasty Christmas Bites: Molasses Spice Cookies

By Beth V

It’s only fitting that the final recipe in the Christmas Bites series is for a delicious cookie. This is one of the most delicious cookie recipes ever. I’ve made them for the past several years. They do not even contain an ounce of chocolate. They do contain a very odd-sounding ingredient, for a cookie.

Black pepper. Wait, black pepper cookies don’t sound quite as appealing as chocolate, do they? Well, black pepper is just one of the many ingredients that make for the very complex collection of flavors in these Molasses Spice cookies.  These are big, flavorful cookies that really do taste amazing. They are a little crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, and spicy with a teeny bit of heat from the black pepper. They are almost like a big, soft gingersnap. These are SO good that it is bad for me to make them because I feel compelled to eat them. I sacrificed for my faithful blog readers. I promise more waist-line friendly recipes will be coming in the New Year!

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