Dark Chocolate Cookies 3 Ways

All of the Chocolate Week recipes have been leading up to today!

This is the mother of all baking discoveries! You can make 3 amazing cookies with the same dough! Read on...this might just be the most exciting news you hear all day.

Dark Chocolate Cookie Dough

1 ¼ cups butter, at room temperature
2 cups powdered sugar
1 cup dutch processes cocoa or dark cocoa powder (I used Hershey's Special Dark Cocoa)
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1 ½ to 1 ¾ cups flour

In a stand mixer, with a cookie paddle attached, cream the butter and sugar together on medium speed until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the cocoa powder, salt, and vanilla and mix until incorporated. Add half of the flour and mix. Add the remaining flour, ¼ cup at a time until you get a pretty dry dough. You don't want the dough to be sticky at all and it might even crumble just a little. Don't be worried about a dry dough...we want a cookie that doesn't spread when baked and is crispy! Divide the dough into 3 balls and pat them together to form a disk. Cover the disks in plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 15 minutes.

Now if your world is crazy like mine and 3 hours instead of 15 minutes pass before you get back to baking, let the dough rest at room temperature for 15 minutes. The butter makes the dough super stiff if it's too cold.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Remove plastic from one disk and roll your dough out between two pieces of parchment paper or on a lightly floured surface. Roll the dough thin! We are talking ¼ inch to an ⅛ inch thick. Use a 2 inch circle cutter to cut out the cookies. Place on a cookie sheet and bake for 8-9 minutes. It's super hard to tell when a near black cookie is done. I baked mine for 10 minutes the first round and they tasted burnt on the bottom, so you'll need to adjust as you go. Repeat with the rest of the dough. Place the cookies on a wire rack to cool.

I make the filling as directed in the Homemade Oreo recipe and then divide it in half. I then add half the peppermint extract and half the green food coloring as directed in the Homemade Mint Oreo recipe to one half. I also make half of the chocolate for dipping from the Thin Mint recipe!

Make and bake the cookies once and then finish them up in 3 different ways. These cookies are beautiful and super impressive alone, but they are even more amazing all on one plate together. Take these to your next gathering and people will talk. Oh, how they will talk.