Rainbow Chocolate Chip Cookies

As a big fan of all things rainbow, I've been happy with the new (and still hopefully going strong) Unicorn fad. From Frapps to chocolate bark, I'm for all things rainbow and unicorn. I recently made some Unicorn Edible Cookie Dough to go along with the fad, but I knew I would also need to make cookies too!

After a disappointing miss on making these sugar-filled rainbow monstrosities, I came out the second time with a very tasty and adorable cookie! Enjoy these Unicorn Rainbow Cookies and even if you'd never even consider eating them, I hope you'll enjoy looking at them.

[This recipe is also great if, like myself, you still have most of your 2.5lbs of cereal marshmallows to use.]

If you are more interested in sugar cookies but still want to eat a rainbow, you should check out Unicorn Poop Cookies by kristylynn84 :)

Instructable 274

The recipe I am using is from Show me the Yummy with some minor tweets. I made her recipe a few weeks ago and they turned out great so I knew I could trust it.

Ingredients:

• 1c Butter (2 sticks) - I used cold butter like her, but I don't know if that is going to matter because of how much you work with it.
• 3/4c Brown Sugar
• 1/2c Sugar
• 1 Tbsp Vanilla Extract
• 3c Flour
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 Large Eggs - again I also used cold eggs but don't know how much it will affect our dough here
• 2 Tbsp cornstarch
• Food coloring - I am using red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple but you can use whatever you want
• 1/2c White Chocolate Chips - I chopped these a bit after measuring them, but you don't have to do this.
  • I have recently discovered Unicorn Chips, you could use these instead of white chocolate chips or use a combination of these and white chocolate chips to equal about 1/2 cup
• 1 1/2c Cereal Marshmallows - yet another use for the 2.5lbs I bought - feel free to use more just don't go overboard or it could interfere with the cooking. I just did heaping 1/2 cups full when measuring them out.
• 1c Mini Chocolate Chips - you can use regular chocolate chips, I just like mini better and I didn't want them to distract from the color or marshmallows so I thought mini helped there

Utensils:

• Stand Mixer - if you have one to use it will be helpful especially when dealing with the cold butter and thick dough at the end, otherwise be prepared with a big bowl and spatula
• 2 Baking Sheets - you'll need two if you bake them all at once and if you do them separate so you can avoid putting cold cookie dough on a hot pan
• A separate baking sheet or large plate to put the dough in the fridge - I didn't want to use the same pan to bake that I put the dough on to chill because then I would be putting a cold pan in a very hot oven, didn't seem like a good idea.
• 6 Bowls and 6 Spoons - this is for mixing the dyed dough so you'll need however many colors you are doing
• Assorted Measuring Cups and Spoons
• Bowls for mixing ingredients
• Spatula for scraping down the sides of the mixer bowl
• Parchment Paper - I used to use baking mats all the time but in an effort to try to get chewier cookies I've switched to parchment paper, use what works for you.
• Cooling Racks

This is a pretty standard cookie procedure.

1. Start by mixing up your butter until it is creamy.
2. Then, add in your sugars and mix until incorporated.
3. Add in your eggs and vanilla - you can mix these together first, but if you don't have a bowl or don't want to dirty another, I usually add the eggs and vanilla in and just kind of mix those together in the mixing bowl with my spatula, and then turn the mixer on and mix everything together.
4. Mix your dry ingredients together (flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cornstarch, they should be premixed together to get even distribution).
5. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in the mixer.
6. Stop when everything is mixed. We ARE NOT adding in the chocolate chips or marshmallows yet.

We are waiting for the mix-ins because it just seems like a pain to mix the color into the dough that already has everything in it.

If you are dying your dough, separate evenly into bowls.

Carefully color the dough. I only used 2 drops and you can see I got a bright color, so don't overdo it. You can always add more.

Also, this gets super tiring to stir so good luck.

Once the color is mixed, you can evenly distribute your white chocolate, cereal marshmallows, and mini chocolate chips between all the bowls.

Then, mix those up.

I decided to stick with making 12 cookies like Show me the Yummy did to make things easier on myself. You can do more if you want, you'll just need to adjust your cooking time.

So, now you need to (to the best of your abilities) evenly distribute your colors between your 12 cookie balls (or however many cookies you are doing)

[Sorry I didn't get more pictures of this. It was messy and I didn't want to keep washing my hands to take pictures (and I forgot, I'm human). The last picture above is from the first time I tried to make these and failed but the process was still the same (more about that in Step 6).]

The way I did it was, I started with an extra cookie sheet (well, a pizza pan) and put some parchment paper on it. Then I took the red dough and I divided it out until I had 12 piles. Next, I moved onto each color one at a time and distributed it between my 12 piles.

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You can try to have more distribution of the colors, but it will be more time-consuming. In order to do this, only use half of each color at first when creating your 12 piles. Then once you've added all your colors, go back through all the colors using up the rest. (Kind of like with my Rainbow Chocolate Bark how I used some of each color and kept going back through the colors.) So you will basically have two little mounds of each color on each cookie. This is already a time-consuming process so it's your call.

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The piles may all look the same (with red and orange on the bottom, and blue and purple on top) but we can change that in the next step.

Once you have 12 complete piles and have used up all your cookie dough, stick these in the fridge. It is okay that they are messy, we will fix that when they firm up.

Once they have sat in the fridge for at least half an hour (mine sat for a while because I only worked on them when my baby was napping), we are going to bake. Start by preheating your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. While that is getting ready we are going to prep the cookie balls

To try to help prevent the spreading of the cookie, take each mound and squish it into a tight ball. Once they are all formed, put them back in the fridge on the same cold pan until it is time to bake.

Prep your pans by covering them with parchment paper. If you are doing one pan of cookies at a time, I recommend having two pans so that you won't be putting cold cookie dough on a hot pan for the second batch (I've read this can cause more spreading of the cookies while they bake because it melts the dough quicker). Or you can bake both trays at once if you feel comfortable with that (I really wanted them to turn out so I did 1 pan at a time).

Once your oven is ready. Take out 6 of your cookie balls and put them on your pan with parchment paper. Space them out, they are big cookies. Also, if you want different colors on top of the cookie, turn the cookie balls accordingly. As you can see, I tried to have different colors on top of the cookie.

Now, bake! I went with the recommended 18-22 minutes and found 20 worked for me. You want to make sure they are getting baked all the way through. Remember, they are pretty big.

The last image shows them after they came out.

I left them on the pan until I could safely pick them up with a spatula, then I moved them to a cooling rack.

Enjoy your cookies!

The first time I made these I used a regular old chocolate chip cookie recipe, used baking soda and baking powder that was expired, and this recipe (different than the one I used above) required room temperature butter and eggs and I used cold. So really, everything went wrong.

Sad cookies :(