These chewy chocolate sandwich cookies are filled with a silky cream cheese buttercream flavored with Irish cream liqueur. They’re the perfect treat to make for St Paddy’s or for anyone who loves Irish cream! Leave them as is or dunk in extra chocolate and top with your favorite mix-ins like sprinkles, nuts, or toffee bits.

Tips for making chewy chocolate cookies

Chocolate cookies can sometimes be tricky to get just right. Cocoa powder absorbs so much liquid, so you’re often left with a thick and cakey cookie. But for this recipe, the addition of an extra egg yolk and more sugar makes them thin but chewy, perfect for sandwich cookies.

To make sure your chocolate cookies turn out just right, here’s my top baking tips:

1. Don’t overheat the butter – Espresso is infused into the butter to help deepen the chocolate flavor of these cookies. In doing so, you want to heat the butter and espresso just until the espresso is completely dissolved. If you heat the butter further, water will evaporate and leave you with less butter than you started with. Less butter means more dry and thick cookies.
2. Properly measure the flour – I say this in every post, and for good reason. It’s the number one reason why most recipes fail, especially for cookies. If there’s too much flour, the cookies will not spread properly. If you can, measure the flour with a food scale. Otherwise, to ensure you use the exact amount needed, gently spoon the flour into your measuring cup and level if off with a flat edge. If you scoop directly into the flour container, it packs it down into the cup which could leave you with 1/4 cup or more of added flour.
3. Use dark cocoa powder – For the best flavor, I recommend using Hershey’s special dark unsweetened cocoa powder as it can be found at most grocery stores. Not only does it create a darker color, but it also gives these cookies a really rich and deep flavor.
4. Flatten the cookies before baking – In order to get a thin but chewy cookie, the dough is pressed flat before baking. This ensures the cookies spread evenly. If you find your cookies aren’t spreading enough, it could just be that you need to flatten them even more before popping them in the oven.

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How to make Irish cream buttercream

The cookies have tons of flavor, but it doesn’t outshine the silky Irish cream filling. Cream cheese gives it a slight tang, while the Irish cream liqueur gives the filling so much flavor and richness.

This recipe is also very basic, comprised of butter, cream cheese, sugar, and salt alongside the Irish cream.

I recommend mixing the buttercream together using all of the ingredients minus the Irish cream. Then, you can mix in 1 or 2 tablespoons of the liqueur, depending on how strong you like it.

If the 2 tablespoon maximum isn’t enough for you, you can add one more and then add another 1/2 cup of powdered sugar to help thicken the buttercream. It must be stable enough to not squish out the sides of the cookie, so make sure it isn’t too thin after any additional liqueur.

The easiest way to fill sandwich cookies

When your buttercream is prepped and ready to go, you have a couple application options depending on what you have in your kitchen.

My first recommendation would be to use a piping bag fitted with a large round tip (or any large tip you have). This will make for the cleanest application, and it’s much easier to control the amount of buttercream used per cookie.

If you don’t have piping tips, you can just use the piping bag with the end snipped off or you can even use a large ziplock bag for a corner cut off.

Either way, you want to pipe on just enough buttercream to get an even application, but you don’t want it to be too thick to where it smooshes out the sides. Simply pipe a thin swirl all around the surface of the cookie, leaving a small empty border around the edge. Once you press the other cookie on top, the buttercream will fill that border to reach all the way to the end of the cookie, giving you the perfect cookie-to-filling ratio.

How to store Irish cream sandwich cookies

First and foremost, I highly recommend making these the day you plan to serve them. Otherwise, I find the cookies go a bit stale when stored with the buttercream.

Otherwise, you can keep them at room temperature in an air tight container for one day, or store in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

For more cookie recipes, check out my:

• BEST EVER Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Brown Butter Oatmeal Cookies
• Butter Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Make sure to tag me @butternutbakery on Instagram and comment below if you make these Irish Cream Filled Chocolate Cookies. To pin this recipe and save it for later, you can use the button on the recipe card or on any of the photos above. Happy baking!

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