Project 23: Pinata cookies

I saw this crazy cookie recipe on Pinterest and thought that’s just so involved and OTT that I’ll give it a try.

My excuse for making piñata cookies? It’s sort of close to Cinco de Mayo (I mean, it’s a week away; in December we celebrate Christmas for the whole month so we can celebrate Mexican Independence Day a week in advance) and it’s my colleague’s birthday this week so cookies are definitely a good investment. And why make normal cookies when you can make incredibly complicated cookies and generate a blog post out of them?

So we start by making cookie dough and then dividing it into balls that are individually coloured. The far corner is purple but it looks black in this photo. 

Then you layer it in a tin so the dough will come out in stripes and leave it in the fridge overnight.

Once out of your tin, you cut it in slices and use your donkey (or burro if we’re going for authenticity) cookie cutter. This – and I need to address immediately – was actually something I had in my collection. I inherited the oddest assortment of cookie cutters from my Grandma Stevenson and therefore I own a donkey (or it could be a horse?) cookie cutter. I also own an axe, a windmill and a full suite of the four card suits in cookie cutter form but more on those later. 

And then you bake. According to the recipe blog I followed you’re supposed to glue them together with icing and mini M&Ms in the middle. But I didn’t do this because then I’d have to make twice as many to make enough for the office and the effort in getting the stripey dough was more than enough stress.  

A note to any potential followers who think, “this is awesome, I’m totally doing this”:  the dough wastage is really high and made me a bit emotional. Nobody wants to waste cookie dough! You can’t just re-roll the scraps that aren’t in the cutter though because then you lose the stripes. So therefore I used a tiny circle cutter to get some small cookies out of the stripes and then the scraps that couldn’t be used I’ve put in the freezer so I can use it for a cookie-crust of a pie or something. But if you hate waste then this is like your worst nightmare.

Oh! Forgot to mention that the original recipe tells you to cook the striped slices and then punch out the shapes – that’s even more wasteful than my tactic. Basically these look adorable but I’ve convinced myself by writing this blog this is not worth the effort. Just cook some normal chocolate chip cookies and everyone is a winner.