In honor of the entirety of November now being the unofficial start of the Christmas season (what even is Thanksgiving?), this week I decided to make some hot chocolate and marshmallow cookies. I got this recipe from Gemma Stafford over at biggerbolderbaking.com after seeing a video of her making the cookies on YouTube and realizing they were something I needed to make right now.

I doubled the recipe she had on her website, just because I wanted to utilize as many of the perishable ingredients as possible, and ended up with 51 cookies, so if you aren’t planning on feeding a small army I’d suggest halving the recipe I’m about to describe.

The first step was mixing the 12 tablespoons of butter with two cups of brown sugar. I forgot to soften the butter and it was physically impossible to beat it into anything but a brown blob. After popping it in the microwave for a few seconds it was much more manageable and easy to beat until creamy. I did this all by hand and it’s totally doable, plus you get a great bicep and core workout and burn a bunch of calories that will be gained back within seconds of the cookies being finished.

Once that was done, I melted a cup and a half of dark bakers chocolate and set it aside to cool. Then I mixed (the recipe said sift but I don’t have a sieve, so I just whisked them together briefly and it worked fine) together two cups of flour, two tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder, one teaspoon of baking soda and a half teaspoon salt.

Then I added four eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition, to the butter and sugar. Once that was incorporated, I added the cooled chocolate (hot chocolate would cook the eggs, and that’s nasty, so I let it cool first) and vanilla extract. Next, I added in the dry ingredients in small increments, working it together until it was smooth. The original, not-doubled recipe called for two and one fourth cups of dark chocolate chips, but I’d only bought about two and a half cups, so that’s all I added. It was so hard to mix in all that chocolate and there was just so much of it, that by the time I finished mixing it all together it was more chocolate chips than dough. If you do halve this recipe, I’d definitely add the chips in increments and leave it up to taste.

I scooped about a tablespoon of dough onto baking sheets and baked the cookies for about seven minutes, then added the marshmallows on top and put them back in the oven until the marshmallows began to melt and toast. Do NOT worry about overbaking these cookies. I thought the first batch looked too gooey after seven minutes and left it for 12 instead and it was so hard to get the marshmallow to stick to the cookie, since it hardened as it cooled. It also meant the cookie got even dryer when I tried to melt the marshmallow, so definitely keep an eye on them.

Overall, these cookies were affordable, easy to make and tasted like Christmas cocoa by the fire. I would definitely recommend making some of these over the holidays.

Ingredient list (doubled recipe):

• 1 ½ cups melted dark baking chocolate (you can buy bars and break them into pieces or buy baking chips instead. Don’t worry about getting this totally exact)

• 2 cups brown sugar

• 2 cups all-purpose flour

• 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 4 small eggs

• 2 ½ cups dark chocolate chips

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

• 1 bag marshmallows (any size works, just don’t get the mini ones meant for cocoa)