M&M Cookies

Good morning my lovelies and welcome to a cold, wet and dreary Friday. The perfect day to lock the doors, stay inside, turn all the lights on, light an extravagant amount of candles, and indulge in a plateful of M&M cookies whilst working your way through DVD box sets or a personal choice would be the Harry Potter films - all eight at that. Yesterday I had a day off and experienced a very strong craving to bake - what's new there then? What else would I be doing on my day off? Silly question. These are just a simple batch of chocolate chip cookies at the end of the day but sometimes simplicity is best. I love the rainbow colours of M&M's and they are the perfect size for a chocolate chip in a cookie. I thought the bright colours would cheer up the grey day today. The M&M's look like jewels in a bowl. Definitely releasing the inner child in myself with these. I gave some to my Mum to take into work with her for everyone so I hope it has the same effect on them.  Perfect for a Friday treat day.

It's a very simple and easy recipe that would also be great to bake with children. Every time I open the biscuit tin I just get that amazing aroma of warm chocolaty M&M's.

Ingredients - makes approximately 24

150g salted butter
150g caster sugar
225g self-raising flour
2 tbsp milk
2 tsp vanilla extract
100g M&M's (the more the merrier)

Method

1) Preheat the oven to 190°C/ 170°Fan and grease and line your baking trays, I needed three in the end

2) Cream your butter and sugar together until light, creamy, pale and fluffy

3) Sift in the flour and add the milk and vanilla extract. Mix the ingredients together, towards the end you should use your hands to form a dough

4) Next my favourite part - add the M&M's and incorporate into your dough almost kneading it in to get an even distribution. It is also essential that you test one or two just to make sure that they are okay to use

5) Roll your dough into 24 balls - you could make more or less depending on the desired size of the cookies

6) Place the balls onto your baking trays and push each one down using a fork

7) Bake in the oven for 10 minutes, after 6/7 minutes I swapped the baking trays around lengthways to try and get an even bake and to stop one side being more golden then the oven

8) Once baked remove from the oven and allow to cool on the baking tray for about 10 minutes then transfer the biscuits to a wire wrack to cool completely

If I had thought about it at the time I would have saved a few M&M's to put on the top of the cookies after pressing the balls with a fork to get a beautiful and shiny M&M on top.

I hope you enjoy this recipe and it might help to cheer up your rainy Friday. Like I said these are simple to make nothing fancy but also really enjoyable to bake and eat at that. Let me know in the comments if you give these ago. I suppose you could even take it further by icing the biscuits and decorating with more M&M's let your imagination go wild. Another idea could be to incorporate peanut butter into the cookies and use peanut M&M's if you are a fellow peanut butter lover like me. Chocolate and peanut butter what's not to love - quite tempted to give that a go now. Enjoy your Friday my lovelies and the weekend is now insight!

XXX