With a rich vanilla flavor and the crunch of M&Ms, these Soft and Chewy M&M Pudding Cookies are hard to beat! Use regular M&Ms year-round or special colors for your favorite holiday!
Make no mistake, these M&M pudding cookies are perfect year-round. Swap out the pink and red M&Ms for rainbow colors, and they’re perfect for every given Tuesday in the year. Change it to red, white, and blue: 4th of July. Black and orange: Halloween. Blue and white: Hanukkah. Red and green: Christmas. Use school colors, the colors of your favorite NFL team – the possibilities are truly endless.
But my personal favorite? Valentine’s cookies. I don’t know what it is about the pops of pink, but I love Valentine-themed M&M cookies! And most importantly, since I like to send these to friends – they stand up great to shipping!
And my friends are always thrilled to receive this. No joke, one of my friends texted me after receiving the package to say “Thanks a lot. You’ve destroyed my marriage. I’m divorcing my husband and marrying your cookies instead.”
My husband, who provides more constructive criticism than anyone else for my baking, has made it very clear that he loves the base of these cookies. (He likes it so much, in fact, that this batch of cookies stayed at home with him, rather than going to my coworkers.)
High praise indeed for a cookie!
So what’s the secret? It’s so, so easy: a box of instant pudding mix!
These M&M pudding cookies are, as the title implies, soft and chewy. This is thanks to the not-so-secret ingredient: pudding mix! Yes, it might be a little weird to put a box of pudding mix in the cookie dough, but not only does it keep the cookies nice and soft, it adds the perfect vanilla flavor.
So how does adding a box of instant pudding make cookies extra soft? The secret is in the thickening agents! Instant pudding contains modified cornstarch, disodium phosphate, and tetrasodium phosphate.
Kitchen Chemistry
Adding a box of pudding mix to cookie dough both lowers the gluten content of the cookies (my adding additional dry ingredients to the flour) which helps prevent spreading, and adds a thickening agent to help absorb and hang onto the liquid in the dough.
This means the cookies stay thick and spread less — the center stays tall and soft, rather than spreading and getting crispy along the edges.
We don’t want these to be too soft, though – they have to be dense enough to stand up to the full-size M&Ms. I’ve tried replacing the chocolate chips in my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe with M&Ms, but the cookies weren’t quite heavy enough to stand up to such a large, crunchy candy.
These cookies contain the same basic ingredients, but the ratio of flour and egg to sugar and butter is reduced, resulting in a slightly denser cookie with less volume.
Making cookies ahead of time and freezing them is the perfect way to ensure you can always pull out a cookie on a whim!
To freeze these cookies, bake and fully cool the cookies. Add to a freezer-safe storage bag and store in the freeze for up to 3 months. To enjoy, thaw at room temperature.
You can also freeze the cookie dough if you want a freshly baked cookie, without having to mix up the dough! I like to add all the ingredients, scoop the dough into balls, and freeze the balls of dough on a cookie sheet. Once frozen solid, remove from the sheet and store in a freezer bag for up to 3 months.
When you’re ready to bake your cookies, place the frozen dough on your prepared cookie sheet. Bake straight from frozen, adding 2 to 3 minutes to the baking time. Freshly baked cookies, whenever you want them!
Another huge benefit to this recipe? No chilling the dough. Less time from when you start mixing the dough to when you start eating them – which is probably the single most important factor in a recipe, if you ask me!
With a rich vanilla flavor and the crunch of M&Ms, these soft and chewy M&M pudding cookies are hard to beat!
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