M & M Cookies

Did I ever tell you I prefer to bake cake rather than cookies? I love baking bar cookies, but not drop or rolled cookies that much. Reason? It takes so long when you are baking a big batch. I am not talking about making the batter and baking time, but rotating the sheets and baking batch by batch part of it. Cake is very easy since you make the batter, pour into the pan and set the timer and the there is no baby sitting required till the timer goes off. Anyway, I had a request for two kinds of cookies. (Yes, I occasionally take few orders to bake) Request was for a batch of chocolate chip cookies and a batch of M & M cookies. I have already posted few kinds of chocolate chip cookies that I thought I will skip that and post just the M & M cookies.

One year back - Tomatillo Rice, Mango Rice Pudding
Two years back - Mango Jam, Panettone
Adapted slightly from - All Recipes
Ingredients: (Makes 5 - 6 dozen cookies that are 3 1/2" in diameter)
All purpose flour - 4 cups
Butter - 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) melted and cooled
Baking Soda - 1 tsp
Salt - 1 tsp
Light brown sugar packed - 1 1/2 cups
White granulated sugar - 1 cup
Eggs - 3 Large at room temperature
Vanilla - 3 TBSP
M & M milk chocolate candies - 2 cups + 1/4 cup (to top the cookies before baking)


Method:
Make the dough:
In a bowl, whisk together flour, salt, baking soda. Set aside. In another bowl, take melted and cooled butter.  Add both the sugars to it and stir with a strong wooden spoon. Yes, this doesn't need a mixer. Isn't that cool? Stir until all the sugar is mixed well with butter. Add eggs to it and gently break them with the spoon and mix so that everything is homogeneous. Stir in vanilla. Dump the dry ingredients on to the wet and slowly stir till the dough forms. When you no longer see flour streaks, add M & M candies and stir to disperse them uniformly. Cover with a plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or even overnight.

Bake the cookies:
Preheat the oven to 325 F. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper. Take the dough from the refrigerator. Make 2 TBSP dough balls. They will be the size of medium sized limes. Place on the cookie sheet. Top with few M & M so that the top will have those candies if desired. Bake for 12 - 14 minutes rotating the pans halfway. The edges should have just started browning. These are soft cookies. Don't over bake them. Cookies will look puffed up when taken out of the oven, but eventually flatten a bit after cooling. Let it stay on the cookie sheet for 10 minutes. Remove from the sheet to cooling rack to cool completely.

If you do not refrigerate the cookie dough, it will be flat and crunchy cookie. Colder the dough, puffier the cookies. Since the butter is melted and used, I don't see why we can't use oil in place of butter. But the taste would differ too. It won't be buttery.

Enjoy.