At the first snow of each year, my whole family gets together to make cookies. As one of the few Christmas traditions we actually keep up with, it’s become an important part of each winter season for me.
After making cookies year after year, something came to mind. What’s better, the old traditional recipes or something brand new? Using the popular cooking website Delish and an old recipe book from my own cabinet, I decided to put two recipes to the test.
My first recipe was a new one: Delish’s number one choice for 2025 Christmas desserts out of 100, marshmallow hot cocoa cookies.
Besides the marshmallows that come later during the oven part of baking, making these cookies is almost exactly what you would think. The ingredients are the usual suspects and usual amounts, the only unique thing about them is the packet of hot cocoa mix added in with the dry ingredients.
After mixing everything together, I let the dough sit for about half an hour. After that, the dough was ready to be baked.
After about eight minutes in the oven, I took out the cookies and pressed half a marshmallow into the middle before putting them back in for an additional 2 minutes.
Once they came out of the oven, they filled the whole kitchen with the delicious smell of hot chocolate. The marshmallows were toasted just enough to be golden brown, but didn’t melt. The cookies cracking around the center also made them look fancy for such an easy recipe.
The cookies taste pretty good, with harder edges and a soft chewy center. The marshmallow in the middle and the chocolate glaze on top make the cookie seem close to gourmet (even if the glaze is a mess to put on).
One of the only drawbacks is that they are very sweet, eating just half the cookie was good enough. If I made the recipe again, I would make the cookies smaller, so you wouldn’t have to worry about that.
Despite this, the recipe overall was solid. It’s easy to make, tastes good, and makes you look better at baking than you actually are.
My second recipe was cocoa drop cookies from the 1963 recipe book, “Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book.”
Unlike the first recipe from Delish, these cookies had different ingredients than what I was used to. The recipe uses no brown sugar and adds buttermilk, which I’d never seen in cookies before.
Due to the buttermilk, this cookie dough was genuinely some of the goopiest dough I’ve ever seen for a cookie. It felt and looked more like cake batter than any cookies I’ve made before. This made them an absolute pain to get into a second bowl to go in the fridge to chill, but besides that the process was still fairly simple.
I let this dough sit for about the same amount of the first recipe, waiting until it seemed firm enough, though the cookbook calls to scoop the dough with a spoon to put on the pan, so I believe it’spurposefully less solid than the average cookie dough.
The cookies were, again, a pain to actually get on the pan because of the texture, but in the oven they puffed up to look like pretty normal cookies.
Interestingly, because of the way that they go onto the pan, they were airy in the middle and tasted more like cake than a cookie. The texture reminds me a lot of bread, and the way that they rose in the oven was similar to bread as well.
The recipe ended up making about two dozen cookies, but despite me writing half an article about them, they’re really nothing to write home about.
The recipe is way less sweet than the hot chocolate cookies, with more of an actual cocoa taste than chocolate. Without the overwhelming sweetness the cookies were easy on the stomach, while still managing to be taste good.
The only drawback of these (besides the fact that the dough is super messy and annoying) is that the taste is pretty plain, and besides the texture there’s nothing unique about them at all. If there was something on top, like a frosting, the cookie would be much better.
Overall, I don’t think I would make this recipe again. There are tastier recipes that are less of a hassle and take less time.
Even though I was rooting for Betty Crocker, in my mind it’s undeniable which recipe was better. Despite the fact that the hot chocolate cookies are a little too sweet, they are easier to make, taste better, and have a better presentation than the cocoa drop cookies.
