Last year one of my pals proposed to his girlfriend, which I don’t think was a big surprise to most people but was lovely all the same. For their engagement party there was a request for no gifts unless they were useful or edible, so I picked the latter because I’m not a useful person, but I love food.
Pinata cookies are something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile, and so I figured this was as good a time as any. I used a simple sugar cookie recipe as the base, with each ‘pinata cookie’ being made up of 3 individual cookies; two medium heart-shaped cookies, with a third medium cookie with the inner portion cut out.
I pre-cut the cookies before baking, but I think you’d achieve a more uniform shape if you baked the cookie dough in one massive slab, then very quickly cut out the heart shapes before the dough cooled. I just didn’t want to risk being off with the timing so did it this way.
Once baked, I allowed the cookies to cool. In the meantime, I made an icing out of one egg white and as much icing (powdered) sugar as it took to form a thick icing. Getting the consistency right was a bit tricky; too thick and it is too hard to pipe. Too thin and it runs everywhere. It can take a bit of trial and error but you can thicken or thin it out by alternating icing sugar and water until you get the right consistency. I also added some vanilla essence for flavour, and pink food colouring.
When that was done, I put the icing into a plastic ziplock sandwich bag, and carefully cut a small corner off, so I could pipe icing together. Then, using the icing as a glue, I stuck a hollow cookie to a whole cookie, as pictured below.
Once that was done, I filled the hollow section with mini M&Ms. I picked out all the pink and red M&Ms and ate all the other colours (that part is really important haha). I think for a dozen pinata cookies I used two bags of family-sized packs of mini M&Ms to get enough red and pink. But obviously you can use whatever/all the colours if you want!
After that, it was simply a matter of glueing each pinata shut with a cookie on top as a ‘lid’. I then used the icing to fix on fondant rolled into hearts with messaged stamped into them.
Ta-da! Pinata! Above photo is by Chris, who enjoyed the cookies (but also said they were very rich, haha).
Also taken by Chris, with their dog Elsa in the background (I think she’s eyeing the cookie pretty hard there).
Enjoy!
Kim Makes Things 