The Good: Tastes great, Easy-to-make, Not the worst sweet in the world.
The Bad: Expensive when it is in season, Does not include frosting
The Basics: Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is an easy-to-use cookie mix that yields good cookies, though it requires more than just what is in the box!
This last winter holiday season, my wife kept the house warm by baking! In advance of her mother and sister visiting us for the first time, she became an incredible baking force. While much of what she made in the kitchen was entirely homemade, she picked up a cookie mix with the intent that she would make it for me. It was the Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix and she was absolutely right! The cookie mix seemed ideal for me, especially when the limited edition cookie mix was paired with the equally limited Pillsbury Mint frosting (reviewed here!).
Unfortunately, my brother arrived around the holidays and took the expensive cookies with him (and gave them away to people who were decidedly not in need, much to my annoyance). Fortunately, during the post-holiday Clearance, my wife and I found one last box of Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix and mint frosting and bought it up so we could enjoy it. In advance of the anniversary of Mitzie’s death, we baked the cookies up together so we would have comfort food and for that, Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookies with frosting are certainly ideal!
Basics
Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is a dry, powdered mix used to make delicious chocolate peppermint cookies. The mix comes in a 17.5 oz. cardboard box and should yield about thirty-six cookies. The chocolate peppermint premium cookies are a soft chocolate cookie with embedded peppermint crumbles right in the top!
Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is a limited edition flavor of Pillsbury cookie mix. It is usually only available from the end of Halloween until the end of Christmas. As a limited edition mix, it is intended to be paired with Pillsbury limited edition white Mint frosting and the two synergize exceptionally well. Unfortunately, at least locally, Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is a little more expensive than most cookie mixes. We found ours originally for $3.49 a box, with the frosting running an additional $1.99 or $2.49 (depending on the store and time of the season). While the Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix makes pretty impressive cookies, we are unlikely to buy them again at full price. The second batch of Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix we picked up, we managed to get at $.75/box (and container of frosting). At that price, it is an absolute steal! I suspect there is a middle ground price that we would pay, but given that the two extremes were all we found it at (and my wife and I are trying to eat healthier now), Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is now a once-a-year treat!
Ease Of Preparation
Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is fairly easy to transform into delicious, premium chocolate cookies. While the box of Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is accented by a canister of Pillsbury limited edition white mint frosting, because the box contains peppermint candy cane fragments, one can get away with the box of mix, an egg and 1/2 cup of sof margarine. Making Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is surprisingly easy (I got to make it the second time!).
To make Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookies, simply open the box of Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix. Inside, there are two bags, one (the larger one) which contains the cookie powder, the other (a small foil one) which contains the shattered candy cane fragments. Set aside the candy cane fragment portion.
After preheating your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, simply mix the Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix, egg and margarine in a mixing bowl. When the ingredients are a smooth dough instead of a grainy paste, you can stop mixing. Then, simply make balls with 1 teaspoon of cookie mix, place them on a tray two inches apart and bake for eight to ten minutes. We found the intended baking time to be more than adequate and the cookies came out soft, hot and delicious.
Pillsbury intends for the candy canes to be embedded into the top of each cookie. They recommend sprinkling the tops of the cookies after they have had about two minutes to cool, and then pushing the fragments into the top of each cookie. That works fine, but if you push the fragments in too soon, they melt into a flavorless mush and if you wait too long, the cookies are already cooled. We also discovered that doing it this way has a tendency to burn out the mint taste in the candy cane fragments. Unfortunately, the chocolate peppermint cookies come out tasting just like chocolate when the candy cane fragments are cooked.
We waited until the cookies were fully cooled, frosted them with the Pillsbury mint frosting and then dipped the frosting into the candy cane pieces. That yielded the most minty and chocolatey cookies we could!
Taste
Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookies smell chocolately, so they prepare the consumer well for the taste experience. Augmented with the recommended frosting, the chocolate scent is almost entirely sublimated to the aroma of mint.
On their own, Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookies are soft and have a very light chocolate flavor to them. The best way I can describe the cookie flavor is that they taste like some weakened form of cake. The flavor is good, but after reviewing many, many chocolates, these taste more like the flour to me than chocolate. In fact, these cookies – while flavorful and delicious – are not even terribly sweet tasting.
That said, they synergize perfectly with the frosting. With the recommended frosting, they take on a sweet, delightful flavor of more than just chocolate and that makes them very yummy.
Nutrition
Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix and the subsequent cookies are sweet snacks, not anything intended to be overly nutritious. The Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix is made primarily of sugar, enriched bleached flower and the crushed peppermint candy. I was actually surprised by how there was nothing in the ingredients list that I was unable to pronounce! These cookies are made with actual ingredients, as opposed to chemicals and preservatives, which puts Pillsbury above several of its competitors.
A serving of two Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookies (there are about 18 servings per mix and that jives with the batches we made) has 160 calories, sixty of which comes from fat. The 2 grams of saturated fat in each serving represents eleven percent of one’s RDA of saturated fat. The egg in the cookies adds some cholesterol (9% RDA) and there are 135 miligrams of Sodium per serving. Even so, the prepared cookies have a smattering of iron, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin and Folic Acid, so they are not all bad for you!
Storage/Clean-Up
Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix comes nicely sealed in plastic bags within the box, so I was entirely unsurprised when I saw that a box had a shelf life of over a year. We last found a box of Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix in early January (2012) and it expires on March 29, 2013! That makes it a great mix to stock up on in defiance of Pillsbury making it a seasonal mix!
While mixing the chocolate peppermint cookie mix up, it is sticky and requires one to wash thoroughly any bowls, utensils, pans and clothes that the dough gets on. Once the mix is transformed into cookies, they make the inevitable crumbs, but they disappear pretty quickly . . . so long as one has a dog a vigilant as our Myah around! Of course, the frosting creates a nice adhesive, so if you frost these cookies, they seldom create crumbs even!
Overall
Pillsbury Chocolate Peppermint Premium Cookie Mix makes very good cookies and it is a mix worth picking up!
For other sweet snacks, please visit my reviews of:
WhoNu? Chocolate Nutrient Rich Cookies
Slim-Fast 3-2-1 Plan Peanut Butter Crunch Time Snack Bars
Kellogg’s Pumpkin Pie Pop Tarts
6.5/10
For other food reviews, please visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!
© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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