Mini Eggs, Massive Spread: Milk Chocolate Egg Cookies

My favorite Easter candy is Whoppers Robin Eggs. I love the crunchy center of regular malt balls, but usually the chocolate coating is just terrible. The chocolate around Robin Eggs is still not good, but the delightful speckled supercrispy shell makes up for it. However, most people I know prefer Cadbury Mini Eggs. And when I saw Mini Eggs in stores in March, I remembered that I had seen a recipe for Milk Chocolate Egg Cookies in The Cookie Collection.  

Making the batter is easy, but the dough requires chilling time. You melt butter and milk chocolate (I used Cacao Barry Ghana 40%); mix them with sugar, light brown sugar, eggs, almond extract, and vanilla extract; gradually add the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda); and incorporate milk chocolate chunks (I used more Ghana pistoles) and crushed Cadbury Mini Eggs. I scooped the dough into cookies -- getting 19 cookies from a batch using a #24 scoop -- before chilling them overnight.

The following day, I pressed more crushed Mini Eggs onto the top of each cookie before baking. The photo in the cookbook is different than the one on the Bake From Scratch website, but both show cookies with tops that are densely covered in pieces of Mini Eggs. My cookies looked quite different because even though I packed on as many Mini Egg pieces as I could before putting the cookies in the oven, my cookies spread so much that the candy pieces ended up far apart. I baked eight cookies on a half-sheet pan (13-inches by 18-inches) and my cookies all grew together into a thin contiguous sheet. I was able to quickly reshape the cookies with a silicone spatula while they were hot from the oven, to separate them and mold them into somewhat round shapes. But because I had scooped the cookies before chilling, I couldn't adjust on the fly and start making smaller cookies. I had made a triple batch of the recipe, so I spent a lot of time baking of sheets of cookies that I had to painstakingly separate and shape afterwards. It was not a fun experience. 

Setting aside the annoyance of the excessive spreading in the oven, I did not care for these cookies. To me, eating one of these cookies was basically the equivalent of eating handfuls of milk chocolate. They were very rich and very sweet, even though the cookie itself was thin and insubstantial. I thought the most interesting aspect of these cookies was the almond extract. It seemed like a very random addition, but it added an interesting flavor to the cookies -- or, at least, something other than just chocolate. 

 

While I was not a fan, many of my tasters really liked the cookies. I suspect that if you like eating Mini Eggs out of the bag, these would probably appeal to you. But you still need to overcome the spreading problem (which was also noted by a couple of comments to the online recipe, so I don't think it was just me). If you like Mini Eggs, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by just eating them straight instead of putting them in these cookies!

 

Recipe: "Milk Chocolate Egg Cookies" from The Cookie Collection, recipe available here from Bake From Scratch.