Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies

Dan & I have been invited to a Cinco De Mayo party being thrown by our next door neighbor, Mary - a wonderful Octogenarian who was the first person to introduce herself to us when we moved in, and makes afternoons working in the yard much more fun (if perhaps less productive, since she & I end up talking for hours).

This is our second year attending, and we decided to take something a little more thematic than we did last year. Dan discovered the blog Chocolate Chipped this week, and in particular a post about Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies. The post is actually a reference to the original post at Coconut & Lime - where you can find the recipe featured in those posts.

I was at first going to try to replicate those cookies... but then decided to go out on my own, be a bit more adventurous, and try my hand at creating my own recipe. I started with the 1-2-3 Cookie Dough recipe (courtesy of Ratio), then scaled it up and added chocolate, coffee powder and spices to create a simple, yet striking chocolate cookie with a bit of heat.

Dan's Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies
8 oz brown sugar
16 oz unsalted butter
24 oz all purpose flour
1 Tbpsn cinnamon
2 tspn cayenne
1 tspn fine ground black pepper
12 oz bittersweet chocolate chips
1 tspn instant coffee powder

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line two cookie sheets with parchment or silicon baking mats. In a mixer, combine the sugar and butter. Meanwhile, sift together the flour, cinnamon, cayenne, and pepper. (If you don't have fine ground black pepper, use a mortar to grind your pepper into a fine powder.) In a double boiler, melt the chocolate chips with the coffee powder, until smooth. Add 1 cup of the flour mixture to the chocolate, and stir until combined. Add the chocolate mixture to the butter/sugar mixture and then add the remaining flour, one cup at a time, just until all combined. Make 1 inch balls of dough and press them down onto the cookie sheet to the desired thickness, leaving an inch between each cookie. The cookies will spread only a bit. Alternately, roll the dough up in waxed paper or plastic wrap to create a log, then cut to the desired thicknesses. Bake for 15 minutes, then cool for 5 minutes before putting on a cooling rack. To retain moist texture, store as soon as cooled in a sealed container.

This makes about 5 dozen cookies - so scale back the quantities if you only want to make a dozen, or so. Also, the amount of cayenne and black pepper makes these a bit spicy, so you could scale those back in relation to the other ingredients... but that kinda spoils the point of the cookies, doesn't it?