Easter Egg Cookies

These Easter Egg cookies are the easiest baking choice for Easter, besides, they are crispy and chewy, gooey and buttery, sweet but not overly sweet, super delicious, and everyone will love them. The Mini egg chunks make the cookies look festive and crunchy at the same time, try them!

Making these Easter cookies recipe is equally easy as making my popular Chocolate chip cookie recipe! No special equipment is needed and it comes together in 15 minutes, this might just be the easiest Easter baking ever!

Jump to:

• Why this is the best recipe
• Ingredient notes
• 7 Expert Baking Tips
• Recipe FAQs
• More Easter recipes
• Easter egg cookies

Why this is the best recipe

1. Perfect chewy texture – Hands down, this is the ultimate chewy cookie recipe! The secret behind chewy cookies is 1. resting them before baking 2. using a mix of high and medium protein content flour 3. not overbaking them
2. Irresistible Gooey & Fudge Center – The Easter cookies should have a fudge, gooey texture. There is nothing worse than overbaked cookies with crumbly texture! I suggest to rather underbaking these cookies than overbaking them. Besides over-baking, reducing the fat content (butter) or over-mixing the ingredients also results in cake texture as opposed to gooey
3. Intense chocolate and nutty taste – I never compromise on taste! The combination of good quality Easter mini chocolate eggs eg. Mini Eggs, brown sugar, and a hint of salt will blow your mind! It will be your family favorite during Easter for sure! Try using the best quality ingredients, it will make a huge difference
4. Quick & easy to make - Last but not least, it is hard to find a more delicious Easter recipe with so minimal effort. Even if you are a beginner in the kitchen, you can comfortably try this Easter egg cookies recipe

Ingredient notes

• Butter: Use always unsalted butter as you want to be in control of the quantity of the salt. I am using European-style 82% fat-content butter in all my recipes
• Light brown sugar:  Granulated sugar can work too however brown sugar gives beautiful molasses flavor to the cookies.
• Egg: Room temperature as always
• Flour: I find the best cookie recipe needs a mixture of soft (pastry) and hard (bread) flour, they both offer different benefits in terms of texture, alternatively use All-purpose only.
• Salt: An essential ingredient in most dessert recipes. Balances flavor and enhances other ingredients, do not leave it out, especially in recipes that contain chocolate
• Baking soda: They all work together to make your Easter cookies tender and chewy
• Mini Chocolate Eggs: For making Easter egg cookies obviously you will need some Mini Chocolate eggs. Try to use real chocolate here that will properly melt during baking and leave a delicious flavor in the cookies

The exact Ingredient quantities can be found at the end of this post, in the RECIPE CARD!

7 Expert Baking Tips

1. What kind of Mini Chocolate eggs to use for this Easter cookie recipe

Truth is, Chocolate eggs are usually questionable in quality and often made of not real chocolate so please try to purchase a reliable quality chocolate brand that will nicely melt into the cookies and leave a pleasant aftertaste. Like always, the key is to use good ingredients eg. Chocolate eggs that you would enjoy eating anyway. Cadbury Mini egg, Creme egg, etc. should work totally fine here.

2. The process of making the Mini egg cookies recipe

Making this recipe is extremely easy and quick but there are a couple of key steps you have to get right to achieve the right texture

1. With an Electric hand mixer cream together room temperature (!) butter and the 2 different kinds of sugar for a few minutes
2. Mix in the egg, just until combined
3. Sift the dry ingredients; the two different kinds of flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda together. Sifting is necessary to avoid lumps later
4. Fold the flour mixture in with the help of a Rubber spatula just until combined. Make sure you fold it only until the mixture comes together, literally 30 seconds. Do not use a mixer and do not over-mix the cookie butter. Over-mixing ingredients would result in incorporating too much air and gluten into the mixture in which case the Easter cookies might get a crumbly, cake-like texture and we do not want that!
5. Finally, fold in chopped mini chocolate eggs into the mini egg cookie dough. Leave some to place on top of the cookies just before baking
6. Line 2 trays with a baking sheet or silicone baking mat and with the help of a Digital scale divide the cookie batter into 10 equal cookies and place them on parchment paper leaving enough space between them to spread. Do not soften the surface of the ball, in fact, try to keep it as rough as possible for a nice, crackly surface
7. Press more mini chocolate eggs on the cookie dough balls
8. Now comes the chilling time. See details below

3. Why chill the cookie dough before baking

You will have to chill the cookie dough for at least 1 hour and the main reason behind it is to avoid over-spread, sad-looking, flat Easter egg cookies.

You might come across "no chill cookie dough" on the Internet, I can almost guarantee that the dry vs wet ingredients are unbalanced in any "no chill cookie" meaning when they are baked, they will be dry. The warmer the dough, the easier it will spread in the oven and our aim is to achieve thick, crackly surface, fudge cookies. If you don’t have an hour to wait, try to chill them 15min in the freezer instead. Regarding the cookies spreading too much or not enough in the oven, there are a couple of tricks to help you fix these issues, see my tips further below.

4. How to bake

Baking the chewy cookies is a super delicate matter!

First of all, never bake any dessert without properly pre-heating your oven first, so start with that. The cookies will be baked at 175 C / 347°F so preheat the oven to +20C / 68F as the oven temp drops when you open the door. Always use Digital oven thermometer to avoid over-baked crumbly or under-baked cookies.

I bake these Cadbury Mini egg cookies in the following way: 10 minutes at 175 C / 347°F (no fan). After 10 minutes cookies should already be somewhat spread and that is when I place even more pecans and chocolate chips on top. It is also a perfect moment to slightly shape the cookies and make them perfectly round, see tips further below in the next section. You can even place some more Mini eggs on them. After, I bake them for another 5 minutes at again 175 C / 347°F. Please note, that each oven is different so you might need to adjust the times slightly.

The cookies are ready when the edge looks sot of baked and the middle slightly gooey but not raw. Do not overbake your cookies! Leave the cookies on the baking pan while they are still hot as they will further set as they cool. Move them to a cooling rack when they are already partly set, like 5 minutes after they are out of the oven, then let them cool on the rack.

Finally, sprinkle them with some sea salt. Salt helps to balance the flavors and enhance the rest of the ingredients.

The cookies are best eaten fresh while they are warm and the chocolate egg is melted. Hmm... so delicious!

Alternatively, you can store the cookies in an air-tight jar at room temperature for a few days, I recommend that you warm them up in the microwave before serving.

5. How to achieve a crackly surface on your cookies

First of all, please do not use substitutes or reduce the sugar in this recipe as it might result in a completely different texture than my cookies. For health reasons, you can of course try to make them with less sugar, or with gluten-free flour, etc. but do not expect the same texture.

For the best crackly surface apply the tray bang trick (that has been around on Instagram for a while, I wish I could credit the person who came up with this brilliant idea):

After 10 minutes of baking time, take the tray out, and bang the whole tray gently to the kitchen counter 3-4x. It encourages crinkle formation on the top of the cookies and also helps if, for some reason, your cookies would not spread.

6. How to get gooey center on your Easter cookies

For gooey cookies, first of all, you need a recipe that has the right ratio of ingredients eg. high enough fat content (butter) vs flour, good news is that this recipe perfectly delivers on that!

Secondly, you must measure your ingredients with a digital scale, a little bit too much of this, or not enough of that can majorly change this recipe eg. adding a little bit too much flour might ruin the gooey center you strive for.

Thirdly, do not overbake the cookies! In fact, you have to take them out of the oven when they do not look properly baked yet… It is better to underbake these cookies than to overbake them.

Please note that you might need to experiment with your own oven in this regard, and you will see whether you need exactly 15 minutes of baking time like in my oven or maybe 1-2 minutes more or less.

7. How to achieve perfectly round cookies

Apply the circular trick:

After the tray banging, grab a large cookie cutter or any round shape thing in your kitchen (slightly larger than the size of the cookies in the oven). Hold the cookie cutter and make circular movements around the almost baked cookies which will slightly tighten the cookies, make them perfectly round shape and the movement also encourages crinkles to form on top. Incredibly easy trick and works like charm! Feel free to place more chocolate mini eggs on top then put the tray back in the oven and repeat the circular movement at the end of the baking time, if necessary.

Recipe FAQs

More Easter recipes

Make sure to also check out my Spring Desserts recipe collection!

Hot cross buns - Check this recipe for hot cross buns from Heidi