M&M Cookies to Celebrate Valentine’s Day
Hubby and I don’t usually celebrate Valentine’s Day. I’m not sure how that happened, but we’re both ok with it. We usually just have a nice dinner at home and some wine. No gifts, no fancy restaurants, just chillin. Even though we don’t get all romantic and mushy on Valentine’s day, I do love to bake for this holiday.
You see, my three favorite colors are red, pink, and purple. I love them all almost equally, but if I had to rank them, it’d be red first, then purple, then pink. Not pastel pink, a good hearty dark-hot-pink – like the dark pink M&Ms in the Valentine’s Day color combo. One of the reasons I love baking for Valentine’s day is that I’ll most likely be making something with one of my favorite colors. Last year I made red velvet cupcakes that I took to work. This year, I happened to grab a bag of Valentine’s Day M&Ms while I was at the store the other day.
I have a soft spot for holiday colored M&Ms. Not sure why, but I just love them. So I set out to make some M&M cookies. Now I’ve already made two versions – regular M&M cookies and chocolate M&M cookies. Both were great, but I always prefer to try new recipes.
I whipped up this batch of cookies last weekend, but didn’t want to have cookies in the house, so I baked up a dozen and froze the rest. The dozen that I baked went with me to a food photography seminar – which I still need to blog about (check out Elina’s or Kerstin’s recap).
To freeze the cookies, I just rolled them out as if I was going to bake them. Then I put them on a cake pan lined with waxed paper and threw them into the freezer. Once they were frozen, I put them all into a ziplock bag. These frozen cookies are going to some friends who just had a baby. That way the new parents can bake a couple cookies at a time for some instant comfort.
M&M Cookies
Yield: ~3 dozen
Ingredients:
1 c brown sugar
1/2 c sugar
1 c shortening
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 c M&Ms
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large bowl, mix sugar, eggs, shortening, and vanilla thoroughly. Add flour, salt, and baking soda to creamed mixture. Blend well. Add 3/4 cup of M&M candies.
Portion out some dough using a cookie scoop. Using your hands, roll into a small ball and place on cookie sheet. Slightly push a few candies on top of each dough ball with remaining candies.
Bake for 9 to 11 minutes. (13-15 if taking straight out of the freezer).
Recipe from Allrecipes.com
I am Jen the Beantown Baker. Engineer by day and baking maven by night. Hubby serves as my #1 fan and official taste tester. We got hitched back in 2006. Barefoot. In the sand. With the waves crashing behind us. It was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. 
Seriously how cute are these? They looks awesome!
This is a good idea! I make the same kind of idea but with hershey’s kisses. If you are able to get the square pretzels (snyders makes them… their shape is called butter snaps or something like that) you top them with a hershey kiss. Then you pop them in the oven on 200 degrees for a few minutes. You will know they are done when the chocolate looks shiny. After that, you can either press down the kiss a bit to join it with the pretzel, or top the pretzel with another pretzel to make a pretzel and chocolate sandwich. They are yummy and super easy! 🙂
This is, quite possibly, the worst recipe I’ve ever made. The only redeeming quality about this is the taste.
So, the first issue is that there was WAY too much liquid in the cake batter. This is where everything went to hell. I decided to make these in cupcake form since I didn’t have round cake pans. The cake crumbled as I attempted to remove the cupcake wrappers.
Next, the marshmallow filling. This was literally the worst trying to put sticky filling into a crumbly cake.
For my surviving cakes that didn’t crumble to death, I attempted to cover in ganache. The ganache was too dang thick for this delicate cake.
So, as I sit here on Christmas eve writing this review, I have toppling, crumbly ding songs sitting in my freezer as I make my last attempt to save these monstrosities.
Afterwards, I will promptly burn your recipe and enjoy it.
I am sure you are a very wonderful person and meant no I’ll will, but this recipe must be destroyed.