52 Weeks in the Kitchen: Week 24: Alcohol

I rallied the troops to help me with this challenge. A wonderful group of ladies get together every Tuesday and I was lucky enough to host last week. They agreed to help me with my challenge in exchange for taking home cookies. I think I got the best deal here (their help and awesome company), but they may feel differently given how delicious these were.

I followed the Cosmo recipe found here and it started with a pretty basic creaming of butter and sugar.

I went for years without a stand mixer or a hand mixer and I forgot how well-creamed butter and sugar look! Doing it by hand just isn't the same.

The dry goods mixture included instant espresso powder and cocoa. I used dark cocoa and two Starbucks Via packets.

The dough was a dark chocolate color and quite thick. The recipe calls for 3T spoonfuls to be dropped, but that just seemed too large. Since the ladies were going to take them home, I wanted to have more small cookies rather than fewer large ones. I went with a generous tablespoon sized drops.

They are hard to tell when they are cooked since they are already dark but it was clear when I couldn't get the first batch off the baking stone without pulling apart the cookie that they needed more time. It was a full 15 minutes for cooking time.

I set up a little station for decorating with lots of icing (holy crap was it good) and small bowls of junior mints.

A good time was had by all and they got pretty creative with their icing techniques.

The icing was so good we were all scraping up the drops and drips for eating!

We ate several then each lady got to take home a few. It was perfect and very fun! This was a bit of a going away party for our wonderful friend Emily who left to go on a cross-country (Bellingham to Boston) tandem bike vacation with her husband. You can follow their travels here if you're so inclined!