Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

Last Christmas while I was looking for new cookie recipes, I found this recipe on the internet at the Allrecipes.com site.  It is for cookies with mini peanut butter cup centers – what could be better!

I had prepared for making this recipe by purchasing two bags of miniature peanut butter cups, one bag was milk chocolate, and the second bag was dark chocolate.  I quickly assembled all the dry ingredients from our pantry.  I used one stick of Gold-n-soft margarine instead of the butter, and got the margarine, eggs, and milk out of the refrigerator so they could warm to room temperature.

Mixing the ingredients in a stand mixer is very easy; I started with the margarine, sugars, and peanut butter (chunky) and mixed them until they were fluffy.  Then one at a time while continuing to mix, I added the egg, vanilla, milk, salt, baking soda, and then the flour.  Using the stand mixer, I didn’t see the need to sift the dry ingredients together as they are well mixed.

The recipe calls for rolling the dough into balls, but you quickly find that there is no way you can roll this dough into anything, it is too soft.  I put my mixing bowl with the dough into the refrigerator for at least thirty minutes to let it harden.  I had turned on my oven when I started the mixing process, but had to let the oven idle while the dough cooled, so in the future I would not turn it on to 375 degrees until the dough is just about chilled.

I spooned about a tablespoon of dough into each place in the mini muffin tin.  You don’t need to grease the tin as the margarine will take care of that.  I baked my cookies for the eight minutes on convection at 350.  They were a nice golden brown, be careful as it would be easy to over bake a tin of cookies.  While the cookies were baking, I unwrapped eighteen of each flavor of the mini peanut butter cups so I could quickly complete the next step.

As soon as I removed the muffin tin from the oven and set it on top of the stove, I started pushing a peanut butter cup into the center of each cookie.  I used enough pressure to push the peanut butter cup all the way into the cookie without breaking the chocolate.  Let the cookies cool in the tin for about five minutes, and then remove each cookie from the tin.  I found that a nylon fork worked well for removing the cookies, lift the edge of the cookie with the fork, and then grasp the edges with your fingers and lift each cookie out of the tin and set on a cooling rack.  You will get a few cookies where the edges break off while you remove them from the tin (I had one, so I ate it), they still taste fine!

This is a very easy recipe to make and would be fun for children to make these cookies.  The recipe says it makes about forty cookies and mine made forty-four (including the one I ate).

Find the Recipe at: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/peanut-butter-cup-cookies/detail.aspx

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell