Chewy sprinkle party cookies

These are the most delicious cookies I've ever made: chewy, doughy cookies with white chocolate chicks and plenty of sprinkles.

This year, we were away for Mr Pippa's birthday. As the only thing he'll 'allow' me to do is make him a cake (and even then it was a few years before he agreed to it, on the condition that there are no candles, balloons, decorations or singing). Not knowing what the kitchen would be like in our holiday accommodation, I thought it might might be a bit much to attempt a cake, so I brought the ingredients to make these cookies, which Mr Pippa had for breakfast, straight from the oven.

Brightly coloured sprinkles are really hard to find in the UK. All I could find were these, which look a bit faded.

I got the recipe from a blog called Sally's Baking Addiction (link to the recipe here - check out how bright her sprinkles are!).

One question I used to have when making cookies was this:

How do you get the cookies to stay thick and puffy and not go like crispy cow pat?

Well, I discovered this secret from Sally's Baking Addiction:

Firstly, chill the cookie mix.

Secondly, instead of rolling the mix into balls, I moulded the mix into little towers and put those chilled cookie mix towers on the baking sheet.

What with chilling the cookie mix before baking, one could prepare the mix, then pop in the oven right before a party (or just whenever you fancy dunking a freshly baked cookie into your brew, which in my case would be around 3pm on any day of the week).