Candy Corn Sugar Cookies

Happy Wednesday and Welcome to Adventures In Baking!  To continue with the Halloween theme this month, today we're baking sugar cookies and topping them with one of the quintessential of all Halloween candies ...... Candy Corn!  (with a few M&M's thrown in too).

I'm using a recipe from Martha Stewart that I found here.  This is the second Martha Stewart cookie recipe I've made and I loved the first one, the Surprise Cookies, so I had high hopes for these as well.  Her recipes are quick, don't have a lot of ingredients and make a manageable amount of cookies. 

 

The ingredients.  Like I said, not a lot of ingredients.  I thought I'd try using this huge bag of whole wheat flour.  Just so ya know ...... it didn't work out too well.  I'd stick with regular old all purpose flour if you try these yourself.

 

 

Let's get started.  Place butter and sugar in a bowl.  Beat with a wooden spoon until combined.  Yep, that's what it says.  With a wooden spoon.  Not a metal spoon.  Not a plastic spoon.  A wooden spoon.  I just used a hand held mixer.  This may have contributed to my troubles.  But I really don't see how.

 

 

Next step.  Beat in egg yolk, vanilla, baking powder and salt.  Why just the yolk you ask? I have no idea.  Add flour and mix until a dough forms.  Ummmmmmm, yeah.  Never did get it to the dough stage.  And I mixed it for over 10 minutes.  I thought the mixer was going to start smoking. 

 

So now what do I do?  Well, let's think about this.  I've got a little bit of baking experience under my belt now.  Surely I can figure this out.......  Well, I know it's too dry and nothing will stick together so I need to add some moisture.  I could add another egg.  The whole egg, not just the yolk.  Or I could add some butter.  And since I have a well documented aversion to eggs, I decided to add a couple tablespoons of butter.  Well, at least it's much closer to dough than it was before but it isn't very firm.  Maybe I'll stick it in the fridge for a little while. 

 

 

While my pseudo dough is in the fridge let's look back at the recipe. The recipe is pretty straight forward. Add this, mix that. Darn that wooden spoon thing. Or maybe it's the whole wheat flour. Let's try again but make the chocolate version included in the notes. This time I used all purpose flour and added cocoa powder (and still didn't use a wooden spoon). And the dough forms just like the instructions intended.

 

Now let's see how the dough in the fridge is doing.  Hmmmmm.  That doesn't look so good.  Let's scrap it and start over.  And so I made the dough again, this time using all purpose flour instead of whole wheat and without the cocoa powder.  It still took a very long time for the dough to form, but I eventually got there.  I think it may actually have something to do with the amount of flour.  The chocolate version uses 1/4 cup less flour and it formed into dough realtively easily. 

 

 

Final step.  Gently press the candy into the center of the cookie.  The cookies with M&M's kinda look like eyeballs. 

 

 

 Taste test.  Definitely a sugar cookie.  Very sweet.  Kids will love them.

 

 

The clean up.  The chocolate dough made 19 cookies and the regular dough made 16 cookies.  And these are pretty tiny cookies.  The cookies aren't much larger than the candy pieces.  The recipe said a batch yielded 36 cookies and I yielded that many for two batches.  I wrapped up a bunch for someones birthday and I'll take the rest to work. 

 

Well, that's it for this week's adventure.  One final Halloween inspired baked delight to go to finish up October.  It's gonna be a good one. 

 

Enjoy!

-Teddra