YW Birthday Gift Idea

There's always been the question... what to gift the young women for birthdays?

Now's the time to decide with budgets being decided and new young women coming in, and I thought I would share an idea I had with you.

I know baking a giant cookie (delicious as it may be) for every young woman may not be realistic for you or cost effective (although my ward is so small it would be no biggie). I'll definitely be sharing more ideas.

But if it is possible for you (even just to purchase a big cookie) it's at the very least a cute idea!

First I ended up baking the m&m cookies. This part was simple, and I used a recipe from #lilluna. 

The thing I struggled with was... how big should I roll the cookie dough to get the perfect? Mega? Size??

So, with a large bag of m&ms and dough on my side, the testing began.

I started out with a whopper of a cookie, with three scoops of cookie dough (that's ice cream scoops), rolled it into a ball, and pressed m&ms into the sides. Ideally you'd follow the recipe and crush half, place the other half, but due to m&m loving family members (🙄😑) I had a limited supply.

The result was the mega dough ball you see below!

(or so I thought)

Lol. Can you understand how BIG that cookie was? To sum it up quickly, after pulling it out 15 minutes later, it failed. Like, one of those Pinterest fails you're too embarrassed to even document. It was a legit pancake... with all the m&m colors bleeding everywhere, a nasty mushy center, and little flavor at all. 

So... we try again. Heheh.

This time, I used 1 scoop of cookie dough and carefully pressed the m&ms into its side. And it worked! The result was exactly as I wanted, the perfect size that exactly, perfectly fit into the Ziploc bag. I wish that specific cookie had been around for me to photograph (obviously the little thumbnail at the top was pretty fake) but life happens. (I should have known that leaving a beautiful cookie on the cooling rack uncovered for 3.5 seconds while I went to grab my camera was a fatal mistake.) 

So what was the purpose of that little segment? To show you about what size, shape, etc, the cookies should be when you put them in the oven. I couldn't find specifications for this in recipes, so I tested it out for y'all! Also. Do not leave valuable cookies unattended. 

 the beauty of cookies in the oven...

So, now that you have the basic concept, don't forget to grab the treat tag print!

Good luck -- and until next time...