Recipe Recaps: Holiday Sweets

If you still have some holiday baking to do and you're wondering what you should make, let me offer a few suggestions.

One option is Mint Truffle Fudge. I used Mint Truffle Hershey Kisses in my batch. I will admit that this fudge was fairly labor intensive, at least compared to what I'm used to when I make my peanut butter fudge. The chopping of all the chocolate was tedious and messy, and I'm not a fan of using a double boiler to melt my chocolate. I'd rather just nuke it. The two chocolates definitely combined to create a pretty intense and deep chocolate flavor so the mint was a nice addition to that.
















I think I appreciated the green coloring of the inside of the Hershey Truffle Kisses more than the flavor of the fudge itself.
















If you're short on time and/or green's not your color, try red! I also picked up a bag of Candy Cane Kisses and went with a pretty simple brownie-Kiss combo. I used Ghiradelli brownie mix and my mini-cupcake molds for the brownie portion, then pushed a Kiss into the middle of each one after they'd cooled for just a couple of minutes. Voila!
















Sorry, I didn't clean up the non-stick spray before taking my pictures. Guess I won't be winning any food blog awards...
















The real winner of my baking spree, though, are these cookies.
















The blogger I got my recipe from calls them Secret Ingredient Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'd seen other recipes that use said ingredient - vanilla pudding mix - but hadn't tried any yet. The McHusband's aunt mentioned trying some cookies made this way right about the time I ran across this recipe so I figured the timing was too much of a coincidence and I needed to make some myself. Let me tell you, I'm sorry I waited so long.
















These cookies are fabulous! They're soft and chewy and loaded with chocolate chips. I used my cookie dough scoop to roll the dough and plop it out onto the cookie sheet so my cookies were relatively uniform in size if not in shape.
















I know, you're wanting a big glass of milk to go with my cookie pictures, aren't you? Set a plate of these babies out for Santa, and I promise you'll be on his nice list for the rest of your life.