Abstract:

When I first started baking cookies for Christmas, I got a hold of a recipe for Chocolate Cookies topped with a melted Andes Mint humbly titled "Best Chocolate Mint Cookies". Humility aside, it truly is a good cookie. Imagine the penultimate edge of a brownie put into convenient cookie form, smeared with a cool, creamy, Andes Mint. At our house, this is a Holiday cookie on the "must bake" list. A list of only nine ingredients makes it easy, and this is a recipe that makes plenty so they're great for sharing too!

Purpose:

As it is with so many family favorites, it's quite often easy to lose track of the source of a recipe. For me, this is usually just unacceptable. I spent a good chunk of my life shuffling test tubes, brooding over minutiae under microscopes, taking repeated measurements, and writing papers for extremely limited audiences. All the aforementioned scientific banality trained me to never talk of certainty without evidence, and the best path to proving to others that you're not full of baloney was to properly cite your sources.



People work hard to craft recipes; and proper attribution is simply the honest and neighborly thing to do. I mention all this because of this great chocolate mint cookie recipe that I bake every year during the holidays. The attribution is piss-poor, but the recipe's so damn good that I felt like I had to share. Now I know where I got this recipe from, but I didn't have a clue where that person got it from. Lucky for me, my source is a librarian (with a great memory). After a brief query, I now know that at least in these parts, this particular chocolate mint cookie likely gained popularity after a Christmas cookie contest that the Hays Daily News put on more than a quarter century ago. And while without spending hours digging thru microfiche I may never know the specifics of the source beyond a name and an event, at least now I know enough that I don't feel as guilty about publishing something without a legitimate source.