Holiday Monster Everything Cookies

With the holidays fast approaching I have been kicking it up a notch in my holiday preparations. I mean there is less than a month until Christmas!!! With the arrival of Penelope my mom and I are taking it upon ourselves to make new stockings for all of the family members. In the past two weeks we have been to the fabric store three times, have come up with the designs and finished one stocking… not sure if we are crazy for taking this on as it seems like a much bigger task than we originally thought!

Last week Emma and I got together to have a play date and whenever we get together it seems we always to end up in the kitchen! Evaluating what we had in the cupboards and with the holidays on our minds we decided to make these festive cookies that contain the remnants of many bags of goodies. I am sure many of you have that remaining handful of some sort of chip that never seems to get used up. We really like the combination of salty and sweet so we used pretzel M&M’s (if you haven’t had them yet I recommend them). Feel free to use any combination of yummy stuff that you love, we were not crazy about adding nuts to the cookies so we left them out but if you are a nutty person (hehe) feel free to add them in!

These cookies turned out to be quite yummy. I have to say I enjoyed them more after they had come to room temperature. We were unsure about the rice krispies at first so made some with and some without. It turns out that the rice krispies really help these cookies maintain their crispiness for several days, of course that is if they last that long!

MOM-O-METER: 4 out of 5

There are a lot of ingredients in these cookies but they use up any leftover goodies you have in the cupboard. They also make a lot of cookies and seemed to come together pretty quickly once all of the ingredients were laid out plus who doesn’t love anything with peanut butter in it!

Holiday Monster Everything Cookies
Adapted from The Pioneer Woman

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
2 eggs (large)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 cups oats (quick or regular)
1/2 cup regular M & M’s (we used holiday ones)
1/2 cup pretzel M & M’s
1/2 cup chopped up caramels or toffee bits
1 cup chocolate chips (milk or semi-sweet or a combination, whatever your fancy)
3/4 cup peanut butter chips
2 cups rice krispies

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Using a mixer cream the butter and the two sugars together until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add vanilla and beat to combine.

In another bowl mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and kosher salt. Add to the mixer and beat on low until combined. After this add in all of your goodies in whatever amount you so desire.

Add the rice krispies at the very end mixing until just combined, we did this by hand as to try to not smoosh them!

You can either scoop the dough out or grab pieces about a tablespoonful and roll them gently into a ball and place onto the cookie sheet. The Pioneer Woman said to bake the cookies until golden brown which we found took about 10 minutes, then allow to cool on a rack.