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I love seasonal recipes and I’m always looking for ways to use up candy canes – either before Christmas to get in the festive spirit or afterwards when we have so many sweet treats left over.

These candy cane cookies are a super easy way to use up leftover candy canes. They are nice and chewy, minty and delicious. They taste just like candy canes in cookie form!

What do you need to make candy cane cookies?

For these candy cane biscuits you just need typical cookie ingredients – butter, sugar, flour, eggs – plus candy canes. You can use any candy canes for this recipe and just need to crush them before adding them to the recipe. To do this we put them in a bag and hit them with a rolling pin, nothing fancy. But you could also use a pestle and mortar.

This candy cane cookie recipe is really easy. You make the cookies as you would any other cookie recipe and simply add the crushed peppermint candy canes to the mixture and then roll the balls of mixture in the finely crushed peppermint candy canes before baking. It adds a great flavour and texture to the finished cookies.

We keep this cookie recipe traditional by using vanilla extract but if you wanted to make them extra minty you could use peppermint extract instead.

If you’re looking for other recipes to try here’s our peppermint candy cane bark, Christmas candy cane rocky road and candy cane fudge. You can see all our Christmas recipes to date here.

You can make this recipe simply with things you already have in your kitchen but here are the things we use in case there’s something you don’t already have:

As you can see, it’s all things you probably have already – that is what makes cookies so simple and convenient to make.

So here’s our absolutely delicious easy Candy Cane Cookies recipe – happy baking!

Ingredients

125 g unsalted butter at room temperature
185 g soft brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg beaten
1 tbsp milk
215 g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
100g Candy Canes – Roughly five, crushed

To decorate

20g Candy Canes – Roughly two, chopped into pieces

Instructions

Preheat oven to 160c/325f/Gas Mark 3. Line a baking tray with baking paper.
Cream butter and sugar in a large bowl. Mix in the vanilla extract and gradually add the egg – beating well. Stir in the milk.
Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl and then fold into the butter and egg mixture. Stir in half the crushed candy canes.
Scoop tablespoons of cookie dough mixture and roll over the rest of the crushed candy canes before placing onto baking sheets leaving approx 4cm between each one as they expand.
Bake for 12 mins or until light browned. They should still be soft in the centre!
Leave to cool slightly and enjoy.

If you’d like to print or pin the Candy Cane Cookies recipe for later you can do so below. Enjoy!

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