It was a sunny autumnal day up here in North Yorkshire yesterday and was a complete contrast to the day before.  All that rain made me think, “Oh this is it, all downhill from here on until Spring!” I was wrong as we had lovely weather.  Now today as I type we are back to the damp and misty conditions.  However, I was in really good spirits yesterday.  Although my son had now gone down with the horrible cough that I had last week and was tucked up on the sofa underneath the duvet, I had two whole days off as I worked all my hours at the beginning of the week.  I love my job as a teaching assistant but I was grateful for the time at home to catch up on everything at home.

By yesterday afternoon I had done a few jobs, the huge compulsion to bake came back.  I was trying not to but my son complained that he was hungry. Feed a cold, starve flu as they say!  He had eaten a ham sandwich at lunchtime but as he has hollow legs being a growing teenager, he asked if we had any biscuits.  I don’t buy them as I know I’d trough the lot before I’d got them into the biscuit tin!

In the end I remembered I had bought some mint flavoured M&M’s last Friday when I was in Leeds at Gob Stoppers, the American sweet shop in Trinity Leeds.  At over £5 for a 225g bag they were much more expensive than the plain or peanut M&M’s you can get in the UK.  But as I love all things mint I bought them!  I thought they would make great cupcake toppings.

In the end they got turned into chocolate mint M&M cookies.  I adapted a recipe I use  from BBC Good Food which is for Smarties Cookies.  These cookies have been made many times over and over for many occasions and if I haven’t got Smarties handy I sometimes substitute  chocolate M&M’s!  This is how I adapted the recipe:

Instead of 350g of plain flour, I used 300g plain flour and 50g cocoa powder.

Instead of 1 tsp vanilla extract I used 1 tsp peppermint extract.

Instead of the Smarties I used the whole bag of peppermint M&M’s.  I put half of the quantity of M&M’s in the mixture itself. Then about approximately halfway through the cooking time I got the trays out of the oven, banged the trays on the worktop* and studded the remaining M&M’s on the top of the cookies.

* This is a fab tip I picked up from the lovely Jo Wheatley who won the Great British Bake Off in 2011.  Ever since I read about banging the tray on the top of the cooker in her  Passion For Baking Book, I have done it with my cookies and it works a treat!

I will definitely make these cookies again in the future but as the M&M’s were expensive, it won’t be too often.  Perhaps that’s a good thing for my waistline, too!

Happy Baking!

Love Sam xx