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Santa’s Favorite Cookies are soft brown sugar pudding cookies, stuffed with Christmas colored M&M’s and festive sprinkles. I mean, I can only assume these are Santa’s Favorite Cookies. They sure as heck are some of mine!
Okay, so I gotta say. I’m kind of in the mood for Christmas now. Even as recent as a few days ago I was completely bah humbug, but now…now I’m excited for the lights and the music, the family and the parties, and the shopping.
(And the cookies…don’t ever forget the cookies!)
I think my shift in thinking really started a few days before Thanksgiving. Kohls started their online Black Friday sale early and I bought a bunch of stuff for $100. Something about buying all the expensive things and realizing they only cost you about $10 a piece really got me in the mood for the holidays.
I know, shopping got me in the Christmas spirit; somewhere in the North Pole Santa is rolling his eyes.
Speaking of Santa, I happen to know that these are his favorite cookies. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? They’re brown sugar pudding cookies filled with bright firecracker Christmas sprinkles and holiday M&Ms.
Santa’s favorite cookies – well, they are my favorite cookies…why shouldn’t they be his?
This cookie recipe is such an easy one, and it’s totally foolproof. I am so in love with pudding cookies, obviously. You can make so many flavor combinations: chocolate, butterscotch, coconut, lemon. If they make a pudding mix for that flavor, you can make that flavor cookie.
For this pudding cookie recipe, I used all brown sugar, which is the same as the one I made for the 4th of July. I knew I had to replicate that cookie for Christmas because second to red, white, and blue, red and green is my favorite color combo.
(Besides teal and teal, that is.)
The cookie dough mixes together easily, with butter and brown sugar and vanilla pudding mix. Brown sugar and pudding mix by themselves yield super soft and pillowy cookies, but when used together? It’s like a soft cookie to the extreme. And they stay soft for days – no stale cookies here!
(Santa’s favorite cookies would NOT be stale cookies!)
Leave these on a plate with a tall glass of milk or eggnog and Santa will be sure to stop and stay awhile. (If the cookies last that long, that is!)
What are your favorite Christmas cookies??
A few notes about the recipe for Santa’s Favorite Cookies:
- The dough requires chilling, so be sure to plan for that.
- Be sure to use instant pudding mix, not cook-n-serve. You just need one of the small boxes, which is about 3.4 ounces, depending on the brand.
- Get creative – use any flavor pudding mix. Have a craving for butterscotch? Use butterscotch pudding mix. Or coconut. Or chocolate. Or banana…you get my drift.
- Beware: these go down easily. If you want to save them for Santa, be sure to hide some in the freezer. 🙂
Enjoy!
Santa's Favorite Cookies
Recipe Video
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter softened
- 3/4 cup brown sugar packed
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 large egg
- 1 3.4 ounces box Instant Vanilla Pudding Mix (not sugar free)
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
- 1/4 cup red and green sprinkles or any colors
- 3/4 cup Christmas M&Ms or any color of M&M
Instructions
- Note: This dough requires chilling.
- Cream butter and brown sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. (You can also use a hand mixer.) Mix in egg and vanilla until smooth. Add pudding mix, baking soda, and salt. Mix until combined. Mix in flour, then stir in sprinkles and M&Ms.
- Scoop 2 tablespoon balls of cookie dough onto a cookie sheet covered with parchment or a silpat baking mat. There’s no need to space them out, you’re going to chill them. Cover and chill for at least 30 minutes.
- Preheat oven to 350°F. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper or silpat baking mats. Place chilled cookie dough balls 2” apart on cookie sheet. Bake 9-11 minutes or until the edges just start to turn brown. Cool 5 minutes on cookie sheet before transferring to a rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container for up to 4 days or freeze for up to one month.
Recipe Nutrition
Click here to see more of my Christmas cookie recipes!
More pudding cookie recipes to love:
Triple Dark Chocolate Pudding Cookies
Butterscotch Molasses Pudding Cookies
White Chocolate Peppermint Blossom Pudding Cookies
Sweets from friends:
White Chocolate Snickerdoodle Pudding Cookies by Something Swanky
Chocolate Chunk Peppermint Pudding Cookies by Chef in Training
Biscoff S’mores Pudding Cookies, by Inside BruCrew Life
Chocolate Chunk Pecan Pudding Cookies by Melissa’s Southern Style Kitchen
Came out flat like pancakes. :/
How long did you chill them for? And did you use real butter or a substitute?
Silly question but I don’t have room to put the cookies on the cookie sheet to chill, can you just chill the dough and then make the cookies and bake them?
You can do it either way; I like to scoop out the cookies because they don’t need to chill as long and it’s easier to scoop the soft dough than when it’s hard.
These cookies rule. I’ve made them with vanilla pudding and chocolate pudding. With different flavored M&Ms too. Thank you for my go-to cookie recipe. Make them with rainbow sprinkles when its not the holidays. 🙂
Made the Santa’s favorite cookies & they turned out SO hard, we could hammer nails on the wall with them!
I’d love to troubleshoot with you – I really don’t know what went wrong. Can you let me know if you made any substitutions? Or if you scoop your flour or spoon it (maybe too much was added?) Those cookies are usually soft no matter what because of the pudding – I’ve made them so many times and they’ve always been soft, even if I over bake them.
Did you make the pudding before adding it to the mixture or did you just add the dry contents of the pudding mixture?
Just the mix!
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