Happy March everybody! We’ve gotten a little bit excited about St. Patrick’s Day around here and have several fabulous recipes to help you get in the spirit.
To start off, we have these fun rainbow cookies. And I just have to say, don’t they look good? Not only are they good looking, but they are fabulously delicious as far as chocolate chip cookies go.
But the best part about these cookies was the genius way that I was able to involve my kids in the making of these cookies. You see, my kids love to help out in the kitchen. Sometimes I love that. Other times times I just want to get everything in the bowl and mixed and in the oven without arguing about who’s going to put the sugar in and crying that I won’t let them crack all of the eggs.
So, when I came up with this idea for the rainbow M&M’s, it was mostly to let my kids have something to do that was fun and easy, not messy and they wouldn’t get upset about it.
I was still a little nervous about my idea, though, because I’ve had some really good ideas that involve my children that have been complete and utter failures.
This was a good one, though!
One key ingredients to it’s success was that the 2 year old was taking a nap. Which is a key ingredient to success of most things.
Then I gave each of them a bowl of their own M&M’s and then they separated them into 6 bowls (one for each of the colors we used for the cookies). They actually were happy during the whole thing and really enjoyed it! Even more amazing was the fact that they didn’t snitch a single M&M until it was all done!
I was a bit shocked, in a good way.
Now to rant a bit about rainbows. So, if you use the regular package of M&M’s you have 5 of the colors that you need for a rainbow. In case you didn’t know, there are technically 7 colors in the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROYGBIV)). I’m a bit particular about getting all the colors on the rainbow. So much so that my 5 year old made up a song about the correct colors of the rainbow. Needless to say, we were all concerned about the lack of the 2 last purple-ish colors. We had to have at least 1 purple. That lead to a rather intense search.
So, if you feel the need to have purple in your rainbow cookies, I have a few options for you. We were able to find some left-over Valentine’s packages of M&M’s and the Dark Chocolate one included a purple. There are also flavored M&M’s that you can find some places and the Raspberry flavored ones have a purple-ish one as well. Or if you’re not as particular about the colors in your rainbow cookies, you could just stick with the colors that come in the regular package.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
- 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 4 cups flour
- 4 teaspoons cornstarch
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup chocolate chips
- 1-2 bags milk chocolate M&M's
Instructions
- Separate different colored M&M's into separate medium sized bowls for each color and set aside.
- Combine butter, sugars, eggs and vanilla in the bowl of a stand mixer and beat on medium-high speed until creamed and well combined.
- Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Then add flour, cornstarch, baking soda and salt. Mix until just combined.
- Scoop about 1 cup of dough into each of the bowls with the separated M&M's, making sure to reserve a few of each color for the tops of the cookies. I used 6 colors and used a 1/2 cup measuring cup, but each was a HEAPING 1/2 cup.
- Add about 2 tablespoons of chocolate chips to each bowl (this is completely by sight and by preference; if you want more chocolate chips, add them!) and gently mix in with the M&M's.
- Place in the fridge for about 15 minutes.
- Heat oven to 350 degrees and line cookie sheets with parchment paper or silicone liners.
- Taking out just enough dough for a batch at a time, use a large cookie scoop to drop dough on prepared cookie sheets about 2 inches apart.
- Use some of the reserved M&M's and gently push into the top of the mounds of dough.
- Bake for about 9-11 minutes, or until the edges have set and tops are just set, even though they might look a bit undercooked in the center.
- Let cookies rest on cookie sheet for about 10 minutes.
Notes
This makes a lot of cookies. If you make bigger ones, you may only get about 30. But normal size cookies I got about 48, which was about 8 of each of my 6 M&M colors.
Recipe adapted from Averie Cooks
These look deliciously soft, what a fun baking project!
G’day! Who does not have childhood memories of these! YUM!
Thanks for sharing at our Foodie Friends Friday St Patrick’s Day Green Recipes Party!
Cheers! Joanne