Turn a macaroon upside down to make bird nest cookies! Bake and fill each little nest with jelly beans or Cadbury mini eggs for a fun spring or Easter treat.

Nothing says Easter or spring better than coconut nests filled with mini candy “eggs”. When I was a kid one of my favorite candies to find in my Easter basket were a chocolate birds nest filled with jelly beans.

Then when I was in college I spent an Easter with a friend and her mother and we made a similar type of cookie using chow mein noodles. They were delicious! But I can’t seem to find that recipe anywhere.  So instead make these little nests out of a macaroon cookie dough and fill them with your favorite candy eggs.

Coconut Bird Nest Cookies Recipe with Jelly Beans

Macaroon cookies are very easy to make.  This recipe only needs 5 ingredients!   Usually macaroons are heaped on to the baking sheet and baked in to little tiny mountains of coconut goodness. But for this recipe, we turn them upside down in to nests to hold our little eggs.

Once you’ve made the macaroon dough, use a cookie scoop to fill the wells of a well greased mini muffin tin.  You want to make sure the nests didn’t stick so grease up those muffin tins.  They should pop right out after baking.

When all the tins are filled, the cookies bake for a mere 8-10 minutes.  Watch the cookies closely because there is a lot of sugar so they burn easily.  Wait for the edge to get a nice golden brown and then take them out of the oven.  You can see some of my tips got a little darker brown.

Let the cookies cool a little before removing them from the muffin tin. Then pop them out and all to cool on a rack completely. Then fill with eggs. I used both jelly beans and Cadbury Mini Eggs. I liked the chocolate with the coconut, but you can only fit one mini egg in a nest so I prefer the jelly beans for looks.  Kids love the look of these but they aren’t  big fans of the coconut which means they are all yours!

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