Monster Cookies are the ultimate cookie for leftover Halloween candy
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Monster Cookies are a tradition in our house: they’re big peanut butter oatmeal cookies loaded to the brim with assorted chocolate candy. They’re big, excessive, and I wouldn’t miss making them with my kids for the world.
Over the years we’ve put all kinds of chocolate in them, and I’m pretty sure we all have opinions on the best. Twix are universally loved while Mounds are definitely the lowest on everyone’s list. It matters not. My kids have loved opening up their candy hauls from walking our neighborhood the day after Halloween and allocating candy to these cookies.
Unwrapping the candy is always an event, and it’s genuinely fun to mix the candy. Are these cookies healthy? Absolutely not. But are they fun to make? Absolutely yes. And if you have a place to take your monster cookies after you finish the batch all the better. These cookies are the kind of cookies that come with stories–stories you can tell while you nibble on a monster cookie.
Collect your candy stash, it’s time to unwrap an unholy amount of chocolate.
The Best Monster Cookies
Why you’ll want to start a monster cookie tradition in your house
- Maximalist: There’s nothing small about these cookies. I fill mine up with almost an equal amount of oatmeal and flour as candy. Pretty much there should be just enough cookie matrix to hold everything together. It’s pure junk food and that’s kind of the point. Once a year I think it’s okay to go big. Eat one and share the rest!
- Mix and match: While I have opinions on the best chocolate for monster cookies, you almost can’t make a bad choice. Whatever you have will work here, and more kinds is better.
- Offload your Halloween candy stash: This really is the true goal of this recipe. You can clear out most if not all of your candy stash in one day so you don’t have tempting little bars of Twix and Whatchamacallits hanging around for months. Again, the best way to monster cookie is to make a batch and take them to a potluck situation so that the candy gets out.of.your.house!
- Pure fun: Unwrapping and chopping the chocolate is a fun bonding time with your kids. It’s right up there with making apple fritters. Some recipes are making memories, and this may the best cookie recipe for just that.
Ingredients for Monster Cookies
Dough
- Peanut butter
- Butter
- Brown sugar
- Granulated sugar
- Vanilla paste
- Eggs
- Oats
- Flour
- Baking powder
- Salt
- Cinnamon
Mix-ins
- Chocolate candy: any pure chocolate, nut, caramel, or cookie based chocolate candy bar. Avoid fruit flavors and mint
What kinds of chocolate candy can I use for monster cookies?
Maybe I should be horrified that I’ve used all of these at one point in making monster cookies over the years. Still, it is true that I’ve put all of them in some combination in the cookies in over a decade of making them. One year we put a whopping 4 pounds of candy in our batch! It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
Plain chocolate
- Hershey’s
- Hershey’s Special Dark
- Chocolate Chips
- White chocolate
- Decorative chocolates (like the striped ruffles that show up in the batch photographed)
- M&Ms
- Hershey’s Nuggets
- Hershey’s Kisses
Nut chocolate or plain nut candy
- Mr Goodbar
- Snickers
- Whatchamacallit
- Baby Ruth
- Butterfinger
- Chick-O-Stick
- Almond Joy
- Mounds
- PayDay
Caramel, crispy, toffee, and cookie chocolate bars
- Whoppers
- Krackel
- 100 Grand
- Heath bars
- Nestle Crunch
- Milky Way
- 3 Musketeers
- Kit Kat
- Rolo
- Twix
Yeah, but what really is the best combination of candy for Monster Cookies?
If you forced me to pick, I’d have to choose M&Ms, Snickers, Butterfinger, Nestle Crunch, Twix, and Kit Kat. Anything else is extra!
What kind of candy should you NOT use for Monster Cookies?
Since the main flavor of the dough is peanut butter, you only want to pick things that go WITH peanut butter (i.e. nothing fruity, and no mint). Do not use: Skittles, Sour Patch Kids, Nerds, Warheads, Andes Mints, Starburst, Twizzlers, or York Peppermint Patties etc.. That’s a flavor adventure you do not want to go on.
Tips for making the best Monster Cookies
- Contain your wrappers: There’s going to be a lot of unwrapping candy. Have a bowl handy that you can stash your wrappers in before they go in the trash. Place unwrapped candy straight on a cutting board.
- Chop but not too finely: We’ve discovered that 1/2″ chunks of any candy is ideal. Smaller than that and they melt too much into the cookies. Bigger than that and it can be hard to scoop the cookies. Hershey’s Kisses are the weird one to cut. Do your best to cut them in quarters.
- Scoop your cookies big: They’re called Monster Cookies, so make them big! I like my Vollrath yellow scoop (about 2 oz) for making balls of dough. That’s a good size.
- Save back some of the candy: Set aside about 1 cup of the chocolate pieces to decorate the tops of your cookies. Doing so will give you the best looking cookies.
- Package them up immediately: Stash them in the freezer until the chocolate sets and then package them up either in cookie bags or a tupperware to take somewhere else. Remember the goal–get the candy out!
Monster Cookies
- Total Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
- Yield: 36 Cookies 1x
Description
Big mostly oatmeal peanut butter cookies loaded with ALL THE CHOCOLATE. These cookies are perfect for using up leftover Halloween candy; any candy is good as long as it’s mostly chocolate or caramel. These are excessive and ridiculous and a Halloween tradition I wouldn’t miss for the world.
Ingredients
· 1 cup smooth peanut butter (256 g)
· 1 stick butter (113 grams), at room temperature
· 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar (225 grams)
· 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons packed brown sugar (240 grams)
· 3 large eggs, at room temperature
· 2 teaspoons vanilla extract or vanilla paste
· 3 and 1/2 cups old fashioned rolled oats (332 grams)
· 2 cups all-purpose flour (260 grams)
· 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
· 1 teaspoon cinnamon
· 1 teaspoon salt
· 4-6 cups chopped assorted chocolate candy
Instructions
1. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment. Preheat the oven to 350 F (180C).
2. Unwrap all of your candy and chop it into about 1/2” pieces. 
Mix the candy together in a bowl and then set aside about 1 cup of candy for decorating the tops of your cookies. 
3. Cream the butter with the sugars on low speed (Kitchen Aid 1 or with a hand mixer) until just mixed. Add in the peanut butter, eggs and vanilla and beat until everything is smooth. 
4. While the butter is beating, mix the dry ingredients: in a large bowl, mix the oats, flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt with a whisk.
5. Scrape the bowl and beater well, paying attention to the bottom of the bowl which always likes to hide a little pocket of unmixed butter.
6. After you’ve finished scraping, pour in the dry ingredients (the mixer should be off!). Lower the mixer paddle into the whole mix, then carefully turn the mixer on then off rapidly. If you make this on/off motion in one little microsecond burst at a time, the flour won’t go everywhere. After a few power pulses, the mixer should be able to mix everything without flinging flour. Mix just until you see no flour–about 10 seconds. 
7. Scrape the dough into the largest bowl you have, and add the larger part of the chopped candy on top. Stir in the candy as best you can. The dough will be fairly stiff. 
8. Use a tablespoon to drop golf-ball sized balls of dough onto your prepared sheets. Place 6 cookies to a sheet, leaving plenty of room between cookies. Press a couple pieces of the reserved candy in the top of each cookie. 
9. Bake two prepared sheet pans of cookies for 16-18 minutes, rotating the sheets 180 degrees and swapping them from top to bottom halfway through baking for the most even baking.
10. Allow the cookies to cool about 5 minutes on the sheet pans before moving them to a rack to completely cool. In that 5 minutes, cut off any caramel that leaked out of the edges of the cookies. Rolo, Snickers, and Twix are notorious for leaking caramel. If you don’t cut off the caramel, it will harden into an unpleasant hard bit at the bottom of your cookie. 
11. Bake extra dough on cooled sheet trays. If they’re too hot, you can place them in a cool table outside, or stand them vertically against a cabinet for a couple minutes.
- Prep Time: 30 minutes
- Cook Time: 54 minutes
- Category: Cookies
- Method: Oven
- Cuisine: American
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1 cookie
- Calories: 353
- Sugar: 31.6 g
- Sodium: 165.7 mg
- Fat: 15.3 g
- Carbohydrates: 47.6 g
- Protein: 5.9 g
- Cholesterol: 26.4 mg
