After my spectacularly entertaining (well, for small children) experiment with the Smartie soufflé I had some tubes of Smarties left over. What to do? Well, Smarties are just sugar-coated chocolate chips so why not make Smartie cookies?

However, the whole raison d’être of Smarties is their colour – might they fade with the heat of the oven.

I should have worried. The cookies emerged from baking still brightly bejewelled.

And they were also very good to eat…a crowd of enthusiastic tasters and testers unanimously agreed that “these are absolutely delicious!”.

Recipe for colourful Smartie cookies

Makes about 30

Ingredients

• 250g/1 cup butter – room temperature
• 300g/1½ cups soft brown sugar
• 160g/¾ cup/4 tubes of Smarties
• 2 tsp good quality vanilla paste
• 2 eggs
• 290g/2⅓ cups plain flour
• ¼ tsp salt
• ½ tsp baking powder

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
2. In a big mixing bowl, cream together the butter and sugar using an electric mixer.
3. Then mix in the vanilla paste and the eggs.
4. Then beat in the flour, the salt and the baking powder.
5. Gouge out a generous tablespoon and drop onto a large baking tray covered in silicon paper. Repeat, allowing plenty of space around each round of cookie dough for expansion. Continue to repeat until the cookie dough is all used up. You may need to do this in two batches.
6. Flatten the cookies slightly and distribute the Smarties between them.
7. Bake for 8-10 minutes.