Pieday Friday Recipe – Smarties & Maltesters cookies

I’ve been baking treats again this month and seeing as it’s World Baking Day on Sunday 17th May, I couldn’t help sharing this particularly naughty cookie recipe with you. I first made these cookies as a birthday gift and I’ve made them a few time since, as they are so simple to make and deliciously moreish. In fact, they don’t hang around long enough for me to snap a decent photo of them – they are usually scoffed by my guests the minute they come out of the oven!Ingredients: 150g self-raising flour, 100g butter, 100g light brown muscovado sugar, 1 tablespoon golden syrup, plus a tube of Smarties. For the Maltesers recipe you’ll need 25g cocoa powder and a packet of Maltesers.

First cream the butter and sugar together before mixing in the syrup. Then add half the Smarties and all the flour and mix into a dough. This will be really crumbly so use your hands to bring it together and divide into 12 balls. Put the balls onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper and press a few more Smarties into the cookies. I didn’t do this while I was taking these photos so most of my Smarties are hidden inside the cookie but I think it looks cute when you can see the colours on top. Bake in the oven at 180 degrees for about 10 minutes until golden – keep an eye on them, they suddenly get really dark if you leave them too long. They will be really soft when you bring them out of the oven but will harden as they cool – so I’d suggest eating them warm, that’s my favourite type of gooey cookie! For the Maltesers version I mixed the cocoa powder with the flour before adding it to the sugar, butter and syrup mixture. Again, distribute the Maltesers throughout the dough and poke extras into the balls if you like. These cookies also take around 10 minutes in the oven and I’d recommend leaving them to cool as the molten Malteser middles are very hot! Sorry for the lack of decent finished photos, I only managed one photo of them on the plate before they were devoured. I think one or two have already been grabbed off the plate by my eager niece and nephew! Let me know how you get on with the recipe if you try it out over the bank holiday weekend and please send me your suggestions for other tasty cookie fillings that you’ve tried by leaving me a comment below.