Easter Candy Bites

This month’s Master Baker theme is Easter candy. At first, it sounds like it might be easy to bake something with Easter candy, but I had a hard time coming up with something. I wanted to highlight one of my favorite Easter candies. I planned to use either Starburst Jelly Beans, Peeps, or Cadbury creme eggs. The creme eggs are my absolute favorites and I prefer the mini-eggs because they are bite size and less messy. The big eggs are also a lot of sugar to handle all at once.

Immediately I thought of putting a Cadbury egg in a cupcake. But since the eggs are so sweet, I thought it would be overkill. Instead, I came up with this idea. It was a trial and error effort. I found out that if you bake creme eggs, the inside gets hard. I wanted the creme filling to remain in it’s gooey goodness state. I found a solution on the third try.

Cadbury Egg Bites – Adapted from Allrecipes.com – makes 18
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 (3 ounce) package cream cheese
1/4 cup white sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
15 unwrapped mini Cadbury creme eggs

Preheat oven to 375F.

In a medium bowl, mix together the butter, cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Stir in the flour and mix thoroughly. The dough should be somewhat firm. Roll into 18 small balls (I used a cookie scoop), place them on a plate and refrigerate for one hour.

While dough is chilling, unwrap creme eggs and put into a bowl in the fridge.

Press the chilled dough balls into the bottom and up the sides of tart pans or mini muffin cups. Bake for 15 minutes in preheated oven. IMMEDIATELY upon removing from oven, push one mini-egg into each cup. Push them in as far as you can.

Allow to cook 5 minutes in the pan before removing to a cooling rack. These are best enjoyed the same day they are prepared.