Thursday 9 August 2012

You Got Your Peanut Butter Cup in my Cookie!

Now, I am well aware that I am not among the first to do this. Far from it, but please realize I made these cookies under extreme duress.

By which I mean a friend linked me to an article about them on Facebook, and baker-shamed me into making them ASAP.And if you don't believe me, look what someone left on my timeline:


If you'd like to visit the original link Leigh shared, it's here. Now, let's look at that comment again, shall we?


Yeah. No pressure at all. 

So, when I saw that a local store had 8 packs of Reese cups on sale, I knew what I had to do.


These cups are ever-so-slightly smaller than the ones you get in a standard 3-pack, I think, and they worked out really well in this recipe.


Start with your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, or use the recipe listed here at Picky Palate, where Jenny has tons of cookies-stuffed-in-cookies inspirations! I found that my personal recipe was similar enough that I just stuck with it.

In either case, you probably have to start with room-temperature butter. I personally was busy with a garage sale and laundry that day, and forgot to put the butter out to warm up, so instead I chopped up my butter into little cubes and left it out for a half hour.


Then I used a hand mixer to beat it into submission, and you know what? It was the perfect consistency. Forget leaving butter out for hours to come to temperature! This was much faster and wasn't much extra work.

(If you're very familiar with making chocolate chip cookies, or you've recently read my Easter M&M Cookies post, you can probably skip ahead a bit, cuz I'm going to go through all the steps for making cookie dough here. Again. Because of reasons.)


As long as I had the mixer out, I used it to cream in the brown and white sugars as well, then switched to a wooden spoon to work in the egg and vanilla.


Even though my arms were sore and tired from garage-sale-manning and laundry-hauling all day, I made myself do the rest by hand because over-working the egg (or later, the flour) could result in disastrously tough cookies.

And, honey, I am the only tough cookie around here!

... Oh, man, that was lame. I should stick to baking.


So anyway, once you've worked in the egg and vanilla thoroughly, pile the flour, baking soda and salt on there and fold together until a firm dough forms.


And add your chocolate chips... Mmm.


So now you have chocolate chip cookie dough. You could just stop here, grab a spoon and go to town (if you're not afraid of raw eggs, dun dun dunnnnn) or you could man up and make the craziest cookies ever.


De-package your Reese Cups. 4 of mine mysteriously disappeared somewhere along the way, but I still had enough to make a dozen of these cookies.


Scoop out one regular-sized cookie's worth of dough onto your baking sheet, press a peanut butter cup on top of it, and top with another dough ball, then press down a bit. Leave lots of space for these to spread because they are going to. A lot.


Once your pan has 6 big cookie dough sandwiches on it, start forming the dough with your fingers so that it covers the peanut butter cup and pinch the dough around the sides to be sure it's sealed well. You don't want the Reese cup's chocolate to melt and run out the sides!


This pic does not convey it well enough, but trust me, these are huge. They are nearly the size of my fist.


For comparison, here's the Reese cookie on the left and a regular cookie dough ball on the right. Dang.

In any case, I baked my cookies at 350 degrees for 15  minutes, and they came out perfect!


Once cooked, let the cookies cool at least 5 minutes before moving them to a cooling rack, or they will fall the heck apart.



Another comparison shot of a regular cookie next to these monsters. I am usually the type to eat quite a few fresh baked cookies because they are just too good but I could not get through even 2 of these. They are massive and crazy rich!


Oh man, look how golden-brown and delicious these look. And once cooled, and cut in half...


You can view the peanut butter cup glory within!

These are rich, giant, and completely excessive. I'm sure the calorie count is through the stratosphere and they have next to zero nutritional value. So of course, I highly recommend them! They are insanely delicious.

The really tough thing about these is resisting eating more than one... because maybe I lost my mind a little and finished that second cookie after all. And maybe my tummy paid dearly for it. But my mouth... oh, my mouth danced for joy!

So yes, try these. But proceed with caution, my friends, for this is a deliciousness from which you may never escape. Or maybe you'll be fine, I don't know. They're tasty cookies, is what I'm trying to say.

So! Thank you, Leigh, for the mad inspiration. Now please never give me another baking idea, my tummy can't handle it! (Just kidding, of course.)

Until next time!

5 comments:

  1. Looks yummy. I want to try these with mini peanut butter cups.

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    1. I want to try that sometime, too! Let me know how it goes!

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  2. Wow, looks great! Between these and the beer cupcakes and the chili cupcakes, you are just the queen of hiding sneaky flavors inside seemingly normal desserts!

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    1. Aw, thanks! I must admit that I get a lot of ideas from other bakers, so I don't know if I'm quite the queen yet... Thank you so much though :)

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