Mini Leftover Halloween Candy Cookies!

My husband and I decided to try not only ginormous candy stuffed cookies but mini candy cookies! Instead of enclosing the candies into the cookies, we just added bits of candy on the top of just baked M&M cookies!

We used the same dough from the stuffed cookie recipe but using just one 3/4" rolled ball, we baked them in a mini muffin tin and added the candy after it baked! So delicious. You get a soft cookie with a burst of chocolate from the candy bars. And you don't feel as guilty as eating a full stuffed cookie!

We had a lot of extra candy

Rolled the dough, put them in a mini muffin tin and into the oven

We cut up the candy bars. Quartered the Reese's Pieces and cut all the rest into thirds besides the whoppers. 

After 20 minutes in a 300 degree oven, we took them out and stuck the candy in each one. 

Then let them cool. 

They get all gooey and yummy.

Once cooled, they are perfect bite sized cookies! 

Recipe (adapted from Sugar Loco and Fantastic Family Favorite's):

• 2 1/8 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 12 TBSPs butter (1 1/2 sticks), melted and cooled slightly
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsps vanilla extract
• 7-8 fun size packets of M&M's 
• Candies to stuff inside the cookies (Reese's work best, Crunch bars, Oreos, Snickers, Butterfingers, etc)

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.  Prepare a mini muffin pan, by greasing with butter or pan spray.  In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt.
In a large bowl with an electric mixer, blend the granulated and brown sugars.  Add the butter and beat to form a grainy paste.  Add the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla, then beat at medium speed until fully combined.  Add the flour mixture and blend at low speed until just combined; do no over mix.  Fold in the M&Ms.
For each cookie, roll a 3/4 inch ball and press slightly into muffin cups.  
Bake in oven for 20 minutes. 
Press the treat of your choice into the center of the cookie.   Let cool for about 15 minutes (even longer if you can) before attempting to remove them from the cups.

Left over candy cookies! Stuffed cookies with an M&M cookie dough!

So the tactic of picking out the candies you would want to eat for the trick-or-treaters, didn't quite work out for us. We ended up with way more candy than visitors and though we like all the flavors of candy, we just can't eat it all. 

In comes the Thanksgiving pot lucks. Why not make cookies with all our leftover Halloween candy? I searched through pinterest and punch fork and found these great recipes:

Fantastic Family Favorite's M&M cookie bars

Sugar Loco's Stuffed Cookies

Make-it-do's First Day of School Cookies

The mini cookies will be done in a later post but this time we're doing STUFFED COOKIES with M&M cookie dough! These are ridiculous! 

So I had to kind of combine two recipes. I used the an adjusted dough of both the cookies and then stuffed it in the method of Sugar Loco's recipe. 

This seemed like a lot of butter but it was only 3/4 of  Sugar Loco's recipe 

Just the wet ingredients, the sugar, eggs and vanilla - looks so good! 

Added the dry to have by dough. Hand stirring was a little more effort than I wanted to do but it was worth it! 

Added the M&M's to the dough. Eight fun sizes of your choice - remember, we're adding more candy in the end!

Per Sugar Loco's instructions, put a 3/4" ball on the bottom of a greased muffin tin. 

Add treat of choice.

Then cover with another 3/4' ball of dough. I did another Reese's and a Butterfinger (broke the Butterfinger in two to make it fit)

All three covered up and ready to go into the oven for 35 minutes

Out of the oven. Not quite the muffin apperance that Sugar Loco got. 

Let them cool for as long as you can - at LEAST 20 minutes! Then it'll come out all cute like this.

When you open it up, you can see the treat! 

I do NOT suggest Butterfingers. The core doesn't really melt and it turned into more of a candy in the middle. 

Recipe (adapted from Sugar Loco and Fantastic Family Favorite's:

• 2 1/8 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 12 TBSPs butter (1 1/2 sticks), melted and cooled slightly
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsps vanilla extract
• 7-8 fun size packets of M&M's 
• Candies to stuff inside the cookies (Reese's work best, Crunch bars, Oreos, Snickers, ets. I don't suggest Butterfingers)

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.  Prepare a 12 cup muffin pan, by greasing with butter or pan spray.  In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt.
In a large bowl with an electric mixer, blend the granulated and brown sugars.  Add the butter and beat to form a grainy paste.  Add the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla, then beat at medium speed until fully combined.  Add the flour mixture and blend at low speed until just combined; do no over mix.  Fold in the M&Ms.
For each cookie, roll a 3/4 inch ball and press into the bottom of the muffin cups.  Press the treat of your choice into the center of the cookie.  Roll another 3/4 inch ball and cover the treat by pressing it over the top.
Place in the preheated oven for 35-40 minutes, checking every so often.  The wet appearance will disappear, and the cookies will look dry once they are done.  Pull out of the oven and let cool for about 15 minutes (even longer if you can) before attempting to remove them from the cups.

Cost of Motherhood: NYT rebuttal

A bad rebuttal by NYT's motherlode. Where the first article was a good general analysis of the cost of motherhood, the motherlode decided to become a money spender if she didn't have children and based this as her response. Very non-analytical and quite frankly silly.

The Benefit, in Dollars, of Raising a Child (She does not, in fact, state a dollar price).

Cost of Becoming a Mother

NYT article shows more than just the cost to house and feed a child. The real changes that come into your life as a woman chooses to become a mother.

The Cost, in Dollars, of Raising a Child

She includes college tuition, assumed contributing to the child till 25 and (most interesting) her loss in pay as a mother. "half a year of forgone wages while on maternity leave and earning 73 percent of what men earn instead of 90 percent like nonmothers (or in my case, the equivalent fraction of my current salary) for the remainder of my career, according to aColumbia University study on the motherhood wage." 

I was shocked to hear this stat. Yes, we would be busier and need to go home early a few times to pick up Junior, but to lose over 25% of your salary potential because you had a child!

On the flip side, a father's income increases by 4%.

At the end, for her family income of around 100k and in the NY area: $1.8M. I'm assuming this isn't per child but rather for the first child.

The author of this article writes a longer essay about choosing to have a child or not on a financial side. If you feel no maternal urges, should you even have a child?

Opting Out of Parenthood, With Finances in Mind

I read another article on the marginal cost of each additional child and it wasn't much more. At least for the day to day stuff.

The Marginal Cost of Children

Highly interseting reads considering more and more of America's educated are marrying older and are therefore delaying this decision.

Foreclosure discount going away. Phoenix and Vegas have no foreclosure discount

It appears that as the housing market is improving, the discount you get by going through the foreclosure process is decreasing.

SFGATE Article

The article is showing that areas with the highest demand will, obviously, have the lowest discounts:

Where in some places there is no discount such as Las Vegas and Phoenix. That could be because homes are already so reduced, that foreclosures cannot go much lower. It would be interesting to find a more in depth study on this. As much as I like Zillow, sometimes their data can be a bit skewed.

So in areas with little financial incentive for a foreclosure, I guess people must fall in love with a home or it has the best options for them in a tough market to deal with a bank vs a private seller.

Are you in one of these low foreclosure discount cities? What are you seeing?

Tuesday Reading 11/13: Perfect Turkey, what would you save from the flood, , Romney is President

The perfect turkey (SFGATE - perfect turkey recipe)
StubHub teams with AEG on ticket sales (SFGATE - Stubhub will be the official secondary ticket seller for many new venues)
Victoria's Secret marketing goes own way (SFGATE - think about it, who else does a runway tv show and is still highly dependent on a catalog system?)
Store-Branded Gift Cards Carry Fewer Fees (NYT - best value is now in store branded gift cards)
What I Saved From the Flood (NYT - a writer of disaster victims dictates what she saved when her house flooded)
 With Airfares, Fliers Trade Clarity for Greater Choice (NYT - lack of clarity in airline fares results in airlines having control on what discounts they want to present to which customers)
A Flight Delay That Ended in Marriage (NYT - it didn't end his marriage. he enjoys flying as it gives him some peace)
More Companies Are Tracking Online Data, Study Finds (NYT - trackers and cookies are being found in higher frequency in just the last five months)
Bundled Households (NYT - though there are less children living with parents vs last year, there are still a lot who are vs 2007)
Cholesterol Tests May Not Hinge on Fasting (NYT - study shows fasting not needed for cholesterol tesitng. scientist confident more studies will show the same)
Romney Is President (NYT - Romney is the president of white, male America)
Black Thursday is the new Black Friday (CNN - as i've said before, I hate this. I think everyone would rather have it on Friday or Wedensday. Let us have Thanksgiving for our family and remember what the holiday is about).
Sandy victim faces insurance nightmare (CNN - insurance agencies are not paying up. claiming anything in basement is not insured that is not for the house. claiming ground floors partially enclosed as basements)
Texas secession petition grows on White House website (Houston Chron - stupid. Makes Rick Perry look even dumber)

Leftover mac and cheese muffins

You know how it goes. All Mac and Cheese recipes end up making way more than your family could (or should) eat. So you end up with a bunch of left overs. This is what we were facing this past weekend. After indulging in a mac and cheese dinner once during the week, we weren't touching it for a while. 

I recalled seeing a ton of mac and cheese muffin recipes and figured, why not put some leftover mac into the muffin tins. We would have a better snack size/side dish portion of mac and cheese and it would be easier to freeze! 

I used EmilyBite's recipe as a guide to oven temp: Mac & Cheese Muffins (with spinach - I should try this one day)

Crock Pot mac and cheese leftovers...yum?

Out of the crock pot liner. First step: taste it first to make sure it's still good. It was! 

As always, grease the tins first and then put in the leftover mac. I also put some extra shredded cheese on top since the mac and cheese was so loose. 

Looking 10x better already.

Straight out of the oven. Yum! 

They were a little greasy in their tins. So you might not need to grease the tins before hand. This might be a step when you have uber gooey fresh mac and cheese.

Once cooled, they set very nicely and were easy to eat. Especially after they were fridged for a few hours. Once in muffin form they were getting snacked on a lot more! As I said, they were greasy when removed warm out of the tins but after they cooled the grease stayed in the tin.

Leftover Mac and Cheese Muffins:

1. Taste your left over mac and cheese. Make sure it's worth saving. 
2. Grease your muffin tin and scoop the leftovers into each tin
3. Season if you think your mac and cheese needs a little help. I used red peppers and some shredded cheese.
4. Bake in 375 degree oven for 10-15 minutes. 
5. Let the muffins cool and enjoy!