Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

I enjoy making Peanut Butter Cup cookies for two reasons: they are easy to make and they contain chocolate peanut butter cups.  The first thing I do when preparing to bake this recipe is to sit in front of the TV and unwrap two small packages  of peanut butter cups(one milk chocolate and the other dark chocolate).  This unwrapping process includes watching a Christmas program and nibbling on a few of the peanut butter cups while trying to keep the little extra pieces of chocolate from getting all over the living room.

With my peanut butter cups unwrapped, it’s time to make the cookies.  Because there are only three steps to the directions, the recipe very easy to make.  I start by creaming the butter with the sugar.  Using my adjustable measuring cup, I measured out the ½ cup of peanut butter (Crunchy Jiff).  I really like the adjustable measuring cup when I measure a sticky substance like peanut butter, molasses and corn syrup, because once you fill the measuring area, you push the plunger and then just scrape off the ingredient.  There is no using a spatula (or your finger) and trying to get the all the sticky ingredient out of the measuring cup.

Once I creamed the sugars, I added the egg, vanilla, and milk and mixed, then I added the flour.  The directions call to shape the dough into 40 small balls.  If you try, you will quickly find the dough is very gummy and when you try to form the balls, you will just end up with a mess.  To solve the problem you can either spoon about a teaspoon of dough into the mini muffin pan (that’s what I did this time), or chill the dough for about an hour, and then you can form the dough into balls.


Once the pan of cookies has finished baking, I removed the pan from the oven and quickly pressed a peanut butter cup into the center of one of the cookies.  I usually fill two or three cookies, and then I use a fork and remove the cookies from the muffin pan.  I have found that if you wait too long to remove the cookies, the peanut butter cup gets very soft from the heat of the cookie and will deform when you take it out of the pan.  You could wait for everything to cool before removing the cookies, but that would take about an hour for the peanut butter cups to cool.  If you want to make another batch of cookies right away, then remove the cookies just after you press the peanut butter cup into the center.

The last time I made this recipe, I ended up with about fifty finished cookies.  Once they were completely cool, I placed them in a Ziploc bag and popped them into the freezer.  When our family comes for Christmas, I will remove the cookies from the freezer about thirty minutes before serving and they will be just as fresh as the day I made them.

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

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell