Valentine’s Cookies

My work is doing a Valentine’s Bake Sale this week so I decided to try some new ‘Valentines’ themed cookies. Results as follows-

Cookie 1- Chocolate Peanut Butter M&M Cookies. Used a whole bunch of cocoa powder. And 1 whole bag of valentines theme peanut butter M&Ms. These bad boys are pretty claggy. They are big, but not super chewy. They aren’t dry, but when you have chocolate and peanut butter m&m’s, your mouth basically gets glued shut. I made ’em big too…probably 6-8 peanut butter M&M’s in each. 2/5 would NOT make again.

Cookie 2- Chocolate Cherry Cookies. Basically made my Almond Joy Cookies with the following changes. 2 tsp Vanilla Extract and 3 tsp Almond Extract. Crap ton of pink gel frosting and red gel frosting (used everything I had on hand to get them pink). Two full jars of Maraschino Cherries, drained and chopped (minus about 20 cherries that Sloane and I ate). And instead of 5 cups chocolate chips, I did about 2.5 cups of semi-sweet choc chips and 2.5 cups of cherry baking chips. No clue where I got those. Have had them for a year. They didn’t really melt, but there were good in the cookies. I used 2 cups coconut but no nuts this time.

The dough was INSANELY wet after all the crap I decided to free-style add to it. I made a batch and had to cook them about 5 min longer than expected, and they spread so much they basically became a single conjoined cookie. I cut them into cookie-shaped slabs and had to wait an hour before I could even move them to wire racks. They weren’t burnt at all somehow. Overnight they turned into chewy, delicious, monstrously pink and red and chocolate cookies. They basically taste like chocolate covered cherries. And apparently when I was gone today at the gym and then again later at the VR place with Mikey and his friend…Sloane (Brandy), and Shanna (also Brandy) ate the ENTIRE tray of cookies. I made 4 more trays though since I wanted to let the dough chill and solidify more. They ended up bomb. Even chilled, they came out about the same as the day before…I just got better at judging when they were done.

Cookies #1 I don’t want to subject anyone to at the work bake sale, and Cookie #2 is good enough that I don’t expect any of these 48 new ones to make it through the week.