Easter Candy Bites
This month’s Master Baker theme is Easter candy. At first, it sounds like it might be easy to bake something with Easter candy, but I had a hard time coming up with something. I wanted to highlight one of my favorite Easter candies. I planned to use either Starburst Jelly Beans, Peeps, or Cadbury creme eggs. The creme eggs are my absolute favorites and I prefer the mini-eggs because they are bite size and less messy. The big eggs are also a lot of sugar to handle all at once.
Immediately I thought of putting a Cadbury egg in a cupcake. But since the eggs are so sweet, I thought it would be overkill. Instead, I came up with this idea. It was a trial and error effort. I found out that if you bake creme eggs, the inside gets hard. I wanted the creme filling to remain in it’s gooey goodness state. I found a solution on the third try.
Cadbury Egg Bites – Adapted from Allrecipes.com – makes 18
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 (3 ounce) package cream cheese
1/4 cup white sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
15 unwrapped mini Cadbury creme eggs
Preheat oven to 375F.
In a medium bowl, mix together the butter, cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Stir in the flour and mix thoroughly. The dough should be somewhat firm. Roll into 18 small balls (I used a cookie scoop), place them on a plate and refrigerate for one hour.
While dough is chilling, unwrap creme eggs and put into a bowl in the fridge.
Press the chilled dough balls into the bottom and up the sides of tart pans or mini muffin cups. Bake for 15 minutes in preheated oven. IMMEDIATELY upon removing from oven, push one mini-egg into each cup. Push them in as far as you can.
Allow to cook 5 minutes in the pan before removing to a cooling rack. These are best enjoyed the same day they are prepared.
I am Jen the Beantown Baker. Engineer by day and baking maven by night. Hubby serves as my #1 fan and official taste tester. We got hitched back in 2006. Barefoot. In the sand. With the waves crashing behind us. It was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. 
Jen, I totally love your blog. You always ahve the BEST treats! I LOVE the picture with all the cookies resting on the m&ms. GREAT idea! 🙂
Looks beautiful as always!
perfect use of pink! So interesting about how the cookies reacted to the way you rolled them! Thanks for the heads up!
Your cookies look great and that’s a good tip about getting them to look their best too. My kids and all their friends love these cookies. I’ve made them a few times since I first posted them and they never last long.
thanks for the link!
~ Michelle
Those are beautiful and perfect for such a great cause
What an adorable picture! Also helps that they are for a great cause! 🙂
M&Ms are my favorite treat and I love that during this month everything is PINK! The cookies look fantastic.
I am bummed I missed your Power of Pink contest as I was utilizing October to raise awareness around breast cancer too! I made some cookies and have a post on my site: http://katskitchenplace.blogspot.com/2009/10/october-is-breast-cancer-awareness.html
I like the chocolate cookie base of your cookies! Thank you for sharing. Looking forward to checking back and seeing all what people make towards your challenge 🙂
A chocolate cookie topped with chocolate candies? What could be better? Perhaps a tall, ice cold glass of milk to go with them! They look divine. I’m wondering if you might skip the rolling and flattening by creating a wide log of dough (without M&Ms), slicing to the thickness desired, then pressing candies on top? Seems like the dough might be fairly easy to shape into a log. A quick pop into the fridge before slicing would help firm it up. Just a thought! I can’t wait to try them.
Best,
Casey
http://www.tastestopping.wordpress.com
P.S. Not sure if I’ve invited you before, but I’d love to publish any of your photos that FoodGawker and TasteSpotting decline! Thanks. 😀
I love the dark chocolate and pink M&M contrast. What fantastic cookies:)
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I just made your recipe for these cookies yesterday and took them to church. The kids went nuts and they’ve never turned out as pretty as they did this time. Thanks for the helpful tips because my m&m cookies have never turned out prettier! 9 minutes was also perfect timing as well.
Both pretty and I’m sure delicious! I love how you showed the comparison between batches to give better suggestions for prettier cookies. The final batch are definitely the prettiest of the bunch. I love that the pink pops w/the chocolate cookie.