Friday 24 October 2014

Pumpkin Spice M&M Halloween Cookies

 
 
Halloween candy is much more prevalent in the US and I received quite a haul of it when my boyfriend’s mum visited the States last month. I didn’t want to just eat the chocolates and sweets and prefer instead to bake with it (though we did already demolish a bag of caramel Hershey’s Kisses!). That has left me needing to do a lot of baking in the run-up to Halloween however!
 
After the success of my Reese’s Pieces cookies I decided to make something similar using these pumpkin spice flavour M&Ms.
 
 
 
They are not strongly flavoured and without reading the packet I wouldn’t have been able to tell the taste was pumpkin – so I decided to boost the flavour of the cookies with some extra canned pumpkin. I found this in the American foods aisle of my local (small) Tesco; you can use it as a pumpkin pie filling or for all sorts of other things.
 
 
 
The cookies are very simple to make, and since I used my American measuring cups I didn’t even need to find a recipe.
 
Makes 10-12 cookies
You need:
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup soft brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup plain flour
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
3 tbsp canned pumpkin puree
½ cup pumpkin spice flavour M&Ms
 
Preheat oven to 175C.
 
Mix the butter, sugar and egg in a bowl then fold in the flour and nutmeg. Mix in the canned pumpkin then stir in the M&Ms.
 
 
  
Line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper and place a heaped tablespoon of the mixture on the sheet per cookie. Press down a little to flatten the cookie. In retrospect I would flatten these quite a lot as mine didn't look all that much like cookies!
 
 
 
Bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes then allow to cool.
 
 
These cookies were delicious – quite soft with a melt in the mouth texture. The M&Ms are like little hidden surprises, though the overall flavour of the pumpkin in the cookie wasn’t strong at all. Which might be a good thing as I’m not sure how I feel about cookies that taste too much of pumpkin!
 
 


I am sending this to Cook Blog Share, hosted by Lucy at SuperGoldenBakes, to share this recipe with other bloggers.
 
 
I am also sharing this with Let's Cook for Halloween, hosted by Simply Food.
 
 
These cookies are also perfect for the Treat Petite challenge, hosted by Kat at Baking Explorer and Stuart at Cakeyboi, as the theme is trick or treat.



To me, biscuits and cookies are comfort food, so I'm sending these to the Biscuit Barrel challenge, hosted by Laura at I'd Much Rather Bake Than.


The theme for this month's Tea Time Treats is cooking or baking with vegetables, and since there is pumpkin in these cookies I'm sharing this with Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Jane at The Hedgecombers.

 
Halloween is the theme for We Should Cocoa, but the recipe also needs to involve chocolate. Luckily these pumpkin spice M&Ms are chocolate! So I am sending this to Hannah at Honey and Dough, who is hosting the challenge on behalf of Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog.
 
 
 

5 comments:

  1. Ooo these are fantastic and just right for getting into the Halloween spirit! I love the colours of the sweeties peeping through. Thanks for sharing them with the Biscuit Barrel!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Trust the Americans to go in for Halloween candy in such a big way. I couldn't stop giggling when I saw your packet of pumpkin M&Ms. Love the sound of your biscuits and they are just right for the Halloween festivities. Thanks for sending them off to We Should Cocoa.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Love the idea of putting pumpkin in the cookies. We don't have an American food aisle in our Tesco (which is a big store). I wonder whether the foreign imports vary from store to store depending on where you are in the country? We seem to have masses of Polish stuff in there!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I need to hunt down these M&Ms! They sound awesome! Thanks for entering into Treat Petite.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yum! you're so lucky you got your hands on these! I've been seeing them on tons of blogs! and the pumpkin in the cookies sounds right up my street!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for your comment, all feedback is appreciated - even the negative! However due to a lot of spam comments on this blog I have had to turn on captcha. If you have problems leaving a comment please email me at caroline@carolinemakes.net