I turned 3 ColourPop lip balms into buttercream-frosted cookies

Strawberry Milk, Chocolate Milkshake, and Watermelon Sugar were my inspiration for these bakery-style cookies.

Makeup brands and dessert themes are the ultimate mashup. When I was in Target, I found three new ColourPop lip balms that totally gave me dessert recipe ideas. The flavors were Strawberry Milk, Chocolate Milkshake, and Watermelon Sugar. I almost went with ice cream, but decided on cookies instead. It felt like more of a challenge.

I’ve loved ColourPop for a while, so it gave me an excuse to get new makeup. Naturally, I brought all three home and turned them into bakery-style cookies. The goal wasn’t to recreate the lip balms exactly. Instead, I wanted something that felt like the edible version of the product.

The result was three completely different buttercream-frosted cookies that got rave reviews from my taste testers.

Strawberry Milk

Of the three, Strawberry Milk felt like the easiest concept to translate into dessert. The balm is described as sweet, creamy, and strawberry-forward, so I started with a thick vanilla cookie dough and added crushed freeze-dried strawberries for concentrated berry flavor. White chocolate chips gave it that creamy milk-and-strawberries touch. The buttercream was a fluffy strawberry frosting made with strawberry Nesquik powder. It added sweetness, color, and that familiar taste of strawberry milk.

The finished cookie tastes like a cross between a strawberry milkshake and a bakery sugar cookie.

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Chocolate Milkshake

The Chocolate Milkshake balm sounded like pure chocolate perfection. For this version, I wanted something that felt like an old-fashioned diner milkshake. The cookie itself starts with a chocolate dough, but the ingredient that really changes everything is malted milk powder. That classic malt flavor gives the cookies a milkshake quality that plain chocolate cookies just don’t have.

Chunks of milk chocolate melt into the dough, while a chocolate malt frosting doubles down on the theme. This was probably the most universally loved cookie of the three. If you’re a chocolate fan, this is the recipe you’ll save.

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Watermelon Sugar

This was the cookie I was least sure about because watermelon in desserts can be a bit tricky. Instead of trying to create a realistic watermelon cookie, I leaned into the candy-inspired direction.

The dough gets tinted bright pink and packed with white chocolate chips and chopped watermelon gummies. After baking and cooling, each cookie is topped with a watermelon frosting made with watermelon syrup. (We’ve recently become obsessed with watermelon syrup, and use it in lemonade all the time.)

This cookie tastes like a sweet white chocolate sugar cookie with a punch of watermelon flavor from the frosting. Then you get a chewy, sugar-coated piece of watermelon gummy that adds an extra burst of watermelon candy flavor. It was the most unique cookie of the trio and such a great surprise.

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This ended up becoming one of my favorite baking experiments of the year. Turning makeup into sweets is incredibly fun. Keep an eye out for more makeup-dessert combos coming up soon!