12 Days of Goodies - Day 5: Chocolate-Caramel Snowballs

Chocolate cookie dough, wrapped around caramel Hershey's kisses, rolled in powdered sugar? Yes, please. Hershey's has really great recipes - in fact, my favorite chocolate cake and chocolate frosting recipes are from their online recipe page (see here for the recipes). The original recipe calls for finely chopped almonds in the dough, but I didn't have any on hand so I omitted them. Also, I used caramel kisses instead of plain - my only note would be to freeze them the day before you  bake with them. I had a few problems with caramel leaking out of the cookies, but they still turned out well and looked pretty.
Aside from looking and tasting delicious, another nice thing is that since with this cookie there are a few extra steps (i.e. covering the kisses in dough, and rolling them in powdered sugar after baking), it's nice that the recipe itself is a doctored sugar cookie mix! I love having a few of these types of recipes on hand. This one could be changed up easily just by using different flavorings and different types of Hershey's kisses. Orange extract with chocolate-almond kisses would be good, or the cherry filled kisses with vanilla extract would be delicious, too -  endless possibilities!
Chocolate-Caramel Snowballs
1 pkg. (16 oz) sugar cookie mix
1/2 c. butter, melted
1 egg
1/4 c. cocoa powder
1/4 c. flour
1 tsp. almond extract
Caramel Hershey kisses - I used about 30, I think
Powdered sugar for rolling
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. Mix first six ingredients in a large bowl until thoroughly combined.
3. Scoop dough by Tbls. and form around a Hershey kiss.
4. Place on prepared baking sheet, and bake for 8-10 minutes.
5. Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then drop 3-4 cookies at a time in the powdered sugar and toss lightly to coat. Place on baking rack to cool completely. You can douse them in powdered sugar again before you serve them if you want to perfect their powdered sugar appearance and get them looking snowy white again.

You can see a tiny bit of the caramel on the bottom, right hand cookie.

The center of these is nice and chewy from the chocolate and caramel,
while the outside has a more tender crumb texture.