Preheat your oven to 375°. Line a couple of baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking, soda, and salt.

Cream together your butter and sugars in the bowl of your stand mixer, or in a large bowl with a hand mixer, until light and fluffy. This usually takes about 3 minutes for me.

Beat in eggs, one at a time, waiting until each one is combined before adding the next. Add the vanilla and mix.

Mix in your dry ingredients until just combined. You don’t want to over mix the dough at this point or your cookies will be tough. Ick.

Dump in your selected chopped up candies, etc. If using a stand mixer, give it just a couple of quick pulses to combine. If you used a hand mixer up to this point, use a spatula to fold everything in. The point is to get all your goodies evenly distributed, without overworking the dough.

At this point, I like to take one of the sheet pans and scoop out my cookies and put them into the fridge to chill for about 30 minutes. This way they won’t spread out too much when baking. (Alternatively, you can chill the entire bowl of dough and scoop it out after) Using a 2 tbs scoop, place the dough balls right next to each other (but not touching) on the pan and place the pan in the fridge. You should get 24-28 cookies. If you want larger cookies, you can certainly use a larger scoop, but I wouldn’t go any smaller or your cookie to stuff ratio will be wonky. You can also freeze the cookie dough at this point, if you want to have cookies locked and loaded the next time you get a craving! You’ll just have to let them thaw before baking.

Place the cookies about 2” apart on your other sheet tray and bake at 375° for 8-10 minutes, or until they just start to turn brown. Let them sit on the tray for 2 minutes, and then transfer to a cooling rack. Wait a few minutes before digging in, then go crazy! Best use of Halloween Candy EVER!