Candy Corn Craziness in Cookies

In our house we often mark the arrival of fall with a big bag of candy corn and melocreme pumpkins. We then promptly need to call our dentist. We love candy corn. One year we thought it would be a good idea to put out a candy bowl of candy corn and salted peanuts for anyone who came to our house. We forgot that we live in the middle of nowhere and don't get regular visitors. We also forgot that we love candy corn and can't stay out of it. So after we ate four bags on our own we decided we had to rein ourselves in. But we still love them. So much so that I'm thinking we need to try out these cookies before the candy corn disappears from the store:

The Original Pin

http://www.averiecooks.com/2013/10/candy-corn-and-white-chocolate-softbatch-cookies.html

Those cookies look so good and like a sugar-coma all in one shot. But you only get Halloween once a year, right? Yeah. That's a good excuse. 

Lucky for me I have a guinea pig with these cookies as Abbi sent in her attempt at making these. 

The Pinstrosity

Not quite there. 

Before jumping into this project Abbi read all the directions (hooray!!), but didn't want to wait the 3 hour chill time for the dough, so she opted for her trusty non-chilled chocolate chip cookie dough recipe from her files. "Even though I didn't use her recipe, I still read through the whole thing to be aware of things to troubleshoot. She said to not let the candy corn touch the pan or they will melt, so I put the candy corn on after I put the cookie dough balls on the sheet. However, my effort was in vain because once the cookies rose, the candy corn slid off onto the sheet. The [above] picture is the BETTER of the two sheets. At least there were a few manageable pieces (not full cookies, but pieces) from this tray. The second tray however, not a single crumb could be saved. The ENTIRE tray was covered in melted candy corn."

At first I wondered if it was the non-chilled dough, but in reading through the comments on the original post I found that some had tried this with non-chilled dough and it came out just fine. So I turned back to the comments to see what I could find and I learned a few things. 

Abbi thankfully didn't do this, and I've never tried it, but someone put a layer of wax paper on the cookie sheets to try and make cleanup easier (especially if the candy corns melted all over). Don't bake on waxed paper! The ladies cookies stuck hardcore to the paper. Use parchment paper, not wax paper. 

One thing that Averie, the cookie creator, mentioned a few times in the post and the comments was rolling the cookie dough into balls with the candy corn already mixed in. This helps to hold the candy corn in place, rather than having it slide off the top. She did mention that you have to check the bottom of each ball before placing it on the cookie sheet to make sure the candy corns aren't poking through. What I would do is have a small bowl of cookie dough with no candy corns mixed in set aside so I could quickly and easily grab cornless dough chunks to reinforce the bottoms of the balls to make sure no candy corns were poking out.

I would also definitely do a test cookie before baking up a whole pan of these. If the dough consistency is a little off (which often it varies for those of us who don't bake with a scale), sometimes the cookies can spread a lot more than others. Need help knowing what to do to improve your cookie? Check back to our Cookie Diagnostics post for some great information!

How many of you think you'll give this a try? I think I will once Halloween gets a little closer! Mmmm!

P.S. Did the cookies look devilishly tempting? They should...this is our 666th live post. cue lighting flash and thunderclap. Too bad this didn't happen on Halloween, that would have been fun.