Martha Stewart's Festive Rainbow Cookies Come With A Pot Of Gold
Even though Martha Stewart's favorite holiday is Halloween (let it be known that Milky Ways are her favorite candy), the iconic home cook, expert crafter, and multi-hyphenate businesswoman comes through with festive recipes for every major holiday. With St. Patrick's Day coming up on Thursday, March 17, Martha knows you'll be needing something sweet to cut through the heaviness of soda bread, corned beef and cabbage, shepherd's pie, and whatever else you have cooking for your traditional Irish feast.
Leaning on the proverbial image of a lucky pot of gold at the end of a rainbow (a folktale that is said to have originated with vikings, who got into the habit of burying looted gold in "undisclosed locations"), Stewart's adorable End-of-the-Rainbow Cookies are made even cuter with halved Mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cups decorated in the likeness of teeny-tiny treasures. If you're worried about executing the symmetrical blue, yellow, and pink stripes bordering the half-moon treats, don't be fooled: These cookies are slice-and-bake, which means novice bakers should have no trouble pulling a picture-perfect batch from the oven.
Stewart posted about the cookies on Instagram this week, explaining that, while the total cookie-making process clocks in at four hours and 50 minutes, a lot of that time is just waiting for the dough to chill in the freezer before slicing — the hands-on part takes just over an hour.
Low effort, high reward
While these cookies are highly decorative, the ingredients required to make them are likely in your pantry already. According to the recipe, all you'll need is flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, eggs, unsalted butter, vanilla extract, confectioners' sugar, and three shades of food coloring — plus those optional (but extremely cute) Mini Reese's Cups.
After making your vanilla cookie dough base, the recipe has you divide the mixture into five sections and mix your blue, yellow, and pink food coloring into the three smallest sections. After that, you'll want to let the dough chill in the fridge for as little as an hour or as long as two days. When the initial firming is complete, you then assemble the rainbow log and pop it in the fridge for as little as two hours or up to one month, which is great news for people who want to taste the rainbow well into April.
When you do decide to bake the cookies, you'll slice the log into quarter-inch rounds and cut them into half moons when they're warm, which is also when you'll adhere your halved Reese's cups using a paste of confectioners' sugar and water. Stewart also suggests adding edible gold sequins and stars to the cookies (she uses ones from Wilton) for a little extra luck.