Mac 'n' Cheese Tiki Room Throwdown Mintstravaganza

Tony and I wanted to redo our brilliant Bakestravaganza this winter, with a different theme. The pumpkin event had been a success, but it was time to try something new; fortunately, my suggestion of chocolate mint desserts also appealed to him. I found a plethora of inspiring recipes, from grasshopper brownies to peppermint hot fudge, with chocolate mint whoopie pies and several cookie varieties thrown in for good measure. I realized we'd need a day and then some to process all these items through the kitchen. A tall order...

...until Tony had a better idea! Enter a reprise of a social foodie/tippler gathering that long precedes any Bakestravaganza: the THROWDOWN.

I can't tell you how that word came to define this particular style of gathering, but I will share what a typical throwdown entails:

• Mac 'n' cheese - the ultimate comfort food, infinitely variable in ingredients and execution. Spicy varieties, made that way either via assorted peppers or unusual hot sauces, are especially popular.
• Tiki drinks - back when the Tiki Bar TV podcast had regular episodes, we watched the episodes ad infinitum and made the corresponding beverages. Volcano bowls were even pilfered from the Hong Kong (or was it Kowloon?) to make Tiki throwdowns more "authentic", which are still used to this day - as is my Drinkbot impersonation. Current beverages are not so podcast-driven, but no less Tiki-inspired.
• Dessert - obviously. I usually have free reign here.
• Electronica - the boys love their techno, and they taught me to love it, too. If you haven't whipped up batter to a throbbing dubstep beat, you haven't lived. 
• Campy entertainment - in this case, The Room! Oh, hi, Mark.

I hope this post's elaborate title now makes more sense. So, how did it go this time around? In a word, marvelously! T and Nick made two tasty mac 'n' cheeses, pictured below. Greg was Master of Cocktails as well as the creator of a tasty salmon appetizer. Tony provided the tunes. Randall came late, but his salsa and willingness to be krumped by yours truly made up for that. We all laughed at The Room. And I baked chocolate mint chip cookies! See, a little bit of the hoped-for Mintstravaganza happened after all.

The recipe appealed to me for several reasons:

• It requires nearly a cup of cocoa powder!
• There are no eggs to bind the dough together. Instead, you use milk.
• The mintiness comes from mint chips, as opposed to peppermint extract.

I have re-copied it here, with my commentary in italics.

• 1 1/4 C flour
• 1 t baking powder
• 1/2 salt
• 2/3 C Dutch process cocoa - Ghirardelli's cocoa always works well!
• 1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 white sugar
• 1/2 dark brown sugar
• 1 1/2 t vanilla
• 1/3 C milk
• 1 bag of mint chips - I used 1.5 packages of Andes mints since I couldn't find any mint chips. I chopped the mints into fine pieces for inclusion in the cookies, which I have pictured here in my favorite dessert bowl! (The text inside the bowl reads "mint chocolate chip with cookie crumbles", referring to an ice cream flavor.)

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F, and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
2. Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt, and cocoa together; set the mixture aside.
3. Beat the butter with an electric mixer until light, and add the sugars. Cream well. Add the vanilla, and beat until smooth. I eliminated the butter-creaming step, creaming the sugars with the butter from the start.
4. Add the flour mixture to the butter-sugar mixture in two batches, with the milk added in between. Mix well. The dough is sturdy, but not stiff.
5. Stir in the mint chips.
6. Let the dough chill for at least 15 minutes. 15 minutes was not enough. The dough was still warm and sticky when I took it out of the fridge. I would try chilling it for at least an hour, and the original cook even says that it can be made (and chilled) up to two days prior to baking. Such a wait would test my patience, but at least the dough would be easier to work with.
7. Scoop the dough onto the cookie sheet, and bake for 14-15 minutes. Let the cookies cool on the sheet once they're removed from the oven; they will set up at this point. I fit 9 cookies on each sheet, making 18 cookies total - a far cry from the recipe's estimated output of 3 dozen treats. Perhaps I just scoop a larger cookie than most folks? The cookies are still gooey when they come out of the oven, but they do solidify quickly as they rest on the sheet.

I love how these cookies turned out. First of all, they're so pretty! Note their deep chocolate color, with occasional bursts of bright minty green, and a rough, toothsome texture.

Secondly, they're really tasty! (I am not alone in thinking this; the boys gobbled them up.) The chocolate dough is rather intense. I expect that's due to the liberal amount of unsweetened cocoa, hardly any "regular" sugar, and the dark brown sugar's bitter molasses tang. These are not sweet cookies. It's also a surprisingly moist dough, considering that we only have butter and a small amount of milk to make the cookies wet; each cookie left an oily imprint on the parchment paper, and they didn't dry out too much when left in the open. The Andes mints melted nicely, and ran like little veins throughout the baked dough. They even remained gooey after the cookies had a chance to cool! Their mintiness managed to infuse the batter overall, so every bite had the pleasing duet of chocolate and mint even if there were no delicious Andes pieces within. Lastly, they're so easy! You get something extremely delicious with minimal effort. I'll definitely be baking these again.

So, yeah. We threw down, and it was good! I can't wait for the next one. (I also can't wait to make those grasshopper brownies...)