Piñata Cookies!

As mentioned before, this year we celebrated Cinco de Mayo with a lot of lovely Mexican food, flan and these amazing piñata cookies.

My adapted version of piñata cookies!

A colleague found this recipe for me and I had to try them. The recipe is deceptive, the cookies end up HUGE (This recipe only made 9 or 10 full cookies) and it is extremely difficult to cut the middle cookie out without breaking the edges. There is also a lot of wasted cookie edges, but you can always just eat them, cause they are delicious! However, the end result is completely worth all the intricate work, they are super fun!

Original cookies, web photo

Here a few tips to explain the differences in my cookies and the original, both pictured on this post. The original recipe calls for cookies cut out in a traditional donkey shape but I was not able to find a donkey-shaped cookie cutter on such short notice so I used a flower shape. Also, the food colouring I used ended up a lot lighter than the originals. I think they use 'gel paste' I don't know what this is and couldn't find any so I just used normal food colouring, however I had to use a lot of it, about 4-5 teaspoons per batch of dough. I also only used five colours as black was not necessary for my flowers. Finally, the original recipe fills the cookies with mini M&Ms, again, hard to find in the UK on short notice so I used small little crispy white, dark and milk chocolate bits that are normally used for decorating cupcakes. They worked well and considering the size of these cookies worked well  as they are a lot lighter and more manageable to eat then a bunch of M&Ms, the crunch is also quite a nice contrast.

Filled with chocolate crispies.