"Black Cat" Cookies 2

I still had a lot of baking coco and flour around, so I decided to remake the chocolate cookies I made last Halloween.

My notes from the first time I made this dish.

I made a few adjustments to the recipes. I used 1 cup 50% splendor + 1 cup sugar, and substituted 1 cup Crisco for the cup of butter.

The dry ingredients, unmixed and mixed.

The dough turned out super crumbly. I wondered if I added 4 cups of flour instead of 3... but the cookies came out so well in the end that I don't think it was a problem if I did.

The dough.

The balls of dough - before pressing

The balls of dough - after pressing with a glass dipped in sugar.

Chocolate Mice

My Sister-in-Law is a great cook, but she is famous for her chocolate mice. The first few Christmases that I spent with my Husband's family included assembly lines where we would create armies of these mice. Somehow, with my SIL in charge, all of the mice looked perfect... but the year that she couldn't make it to Christmas... We ended up having some mutations occur. Can you find the mice that are, well, less that perfect?

Maraschino cherries dipped in chocolate with a Hershey kiss head, almond sliver ears and icing eyes.

Chocolate popcorn

I wanted to spice up some stovetop popped popcorn, so I sprinkled some peppermint Williams and Sonomoa hot chocolate mix and salt onto it. I shook the mixture in the (covered) pan to evenly spread the minty chocolate along the popped corn. This also helped it melt a bit. This was a delicious, although messy, snack.

Ingredients for the chocolate popcorn.

Black Cat Cookies

So I really enjoyed making the popcorn balls (which will be discussed in the next post) and they were delicious, but they got stale really quickly. These chocolate cat cookies are FANTASTIC. I did not use sticks as the recipe called for, which is probably why I ended up with 24 cookies rather than the 12 the recipe predicts.

The tip to dip the bottom of the glass you're using to flatten the cookies in sugar first is a good one. This prevented a lot of sticking and the sprinkling of sugar on top gave a really pretty visual effect. I "carefully" matched the candy corns for each eye (just to make sure that the colors matched on each cookie.) This is a recipe that I will absolutely do again, and I will try to find an excuse to use them for other holidays.

This is a great example of how you can make fun shapes without the use of Halloween cookie cutters. (Of course, with cookie cutters then you'll be able to make more shapes!)

Spooky Halloween Eyeballs

This is a recipe that I was able to cut in half. The chocolate peanut butter balls ("Spooky Halloween Eyeballs") were such a hit, that I made these (without looking like eyeballs) for my Christmas party, too.

I didn't have any smooth peanut butter, but I did have a lot of chunky!I crushed the peanuts it in the food processor, and used this rather than a hand mixer to do all of the mixing for the recipe. I ended up with a smooth and creamy filling that tasted like the inside of a Reese's peanut butter cup.

I had some difficulty covering these eyeballs in white chocolate. As you can see from the picture below, The resulting eyeballs did not end up nice and round, even though the peanut butter balls that I dipped into the chocolate where spherical.

I mixed a little bit of blue food coloring in the remaining white chocolate to make the irises. The pupils were tiny chocolate chips. Since I had run out of white chocolate, I covered the remaining peanut butter mixture in semi-sweet chocolate, adding two "irises" to function as eyes.

Chocolate Spiders

So these may not look like the Chocolate Spiders the recipe is named for with the eyes, but they are certainly cute and perfect for a Halloween party!

This was such a fun cooking project. You mix chow mein noodles into melted chocolate chips, and then plop small amounts onto a cookie sheet. Adding some eyeball sprinkles bring these Chocolate spiders to life. (Yes, I know spiders have 8 eyes, so consider these cartoonish creatures, not an accurate spider representation.)

The melted chocolate: 1/2 tsp vegetable oil per 2 cups chocolate chips. 33 cookies were created.

These Halloween cookies required no baking, making them an easy addition to a party cookie spread. And I think it's the eyeball Halloween sprinkles that really make this project special.