If chocolate kisses have turned up in a recipe or caught your eye at the store, here's what you need to use them with confidence and how to choose them, cook them, store them, what to substitute, and 48 recipes to try them in.

What are chocolate kisses?

Chocolate kisses are the little foil-wrapped, flat-bottomed teardrops of milk chocolate that most people picture when they hear the word "kiss." Hershey's is the original and the one most recipes mean, though the shape is now made by several brands.

Each kiss is a bite of plain milk chocolate, sweet and soft-melting, weighing roughly 4.5 grams, so about 100 of them make a pound. That small, even size is what makes them so useful in baking.

In recipes they are almost never melted. They go in whole as a center or a topping, which is the whole reason a recipe calls for a kiss instead of a chip.

Baking With Kisses

The classic move is the blossom: roll a peanut butter or sugar dough into balls, bake them, then press an unwrapped kiss into each hot cookie the second it leaves the oven. The cookie cracks around it and the kiss softens but keeps its peak.

That is exactly how Peanut Butter Chocolate Kisses and Hershey's Kiss Cookies come together.

Timing is everything here. Press too early and the kiss melts into a puddle. Press it onto a fully cooled cookie and it will not stick. Aim for the minute right after baking, while the cookie is still hot but set.

Kisses also hide inside thumbprint and tea cakes, where dough is wrapped around a whole kiss before baking so it melts into a molten center, the trick behind Thumbprint Kiss Cookies.

For decorating, set unwrapped kisses point-up on frosting or push them into cupcakes as ears or a little nose.

Handling and Mistakes

Unwrap kisses ahead of time, because peeling foil off forty warm cookies one by one is the real bottleneck. A bowl of bare kisses ready to go saves the whole batch.

The big mistake is treating a kiss like a chip and trying to melt a bag of them for a coating. They are milk chocolate with no chip stabilizer and they scorch easily, so they make a dull, soft puddle rather than a clean pour. Use a bar for that.

Keep them cool until the moment they go on. A kiss handled in a warm kitchen fingerprints and loses its sharp point.

Substitutes

For a blossom center, any individually shaped chocolate works. A caramel-filled kiss, a chocolate star, or a pointed chunk of chocolate bar all sit on a cookie the same way. The look changes but the molten center does not.

For a melted-center cookie, a few milk chocolate morsels or a square of chopped bar do the same job, since once it melts the shape no longer matters.

What you cannot fake is the look. If the recipe is built around that pointed silhouette on top, only an actual kiss gives you it.

Buying and Storing

A standard bag runs around 11 to 12 ounces, roughly 70 to 75 kisses, so count on a bag and a half for a big tray of blossoms. Buy a little extra, since some always go straight into the cook.

Store kisses cool and dry, sealed in their foil around 65°F (18°C), away from strong smells. Skip the fridge, where damp air dulls the surface with a pale sugar bloom.

That whitish film is bloom, not mold. It is fine to bake with. Sealed milk chocolate kisses hold their flavor for about a year before the milk solids start to taste flat.

Quick facts

Where to find chocolate kisses: Chocolate kisses are usually found in the candy section or aisle of the grocery store or supermarket.

In Chinese

巧克力吻

British (UK) term

Chocolate kisses

en français

baisers de chocolat

en español

besos de chocolate

Recipes using chocolate kisses

There are 48 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 48 recipes