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.