Date Completed: 7/25/2021

Let’s play catch-up! Over a month ago I made these delicious Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies from the Sweets chapter of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook by Deb Perelman. My, oh my - what a treat!

The peanut butter dough came together easily in the stand mixer with the traditional butter, peanut butter, sugars, egg, flour, etc.

The cookies in her photos were rolled out and cut with darling fluted cookie cutters. I didn’t have a similar shape at home, but was determined to go buy one until I read the full recipe. She kept repeating how difficult the dough would be to handle (crumbly, delicate, etc.). Even though I’m usually up to the rollout cookie cutter challenge, I shied away from this one. I ended up going with her option #2 to form the dough into a log and then slice.

Nowhere near as darling, but definitely easy! I did kick myself because the dough really wasn’t that difficult to deal with (at least in log form). Next time I’ll do the cute cutters!

Once the cookies were baked up, I started on the chocolate peanut butter filling. Hello, delicious!

Also very simple since I just melted everything together. I used a plastic bag with the corner snipped to pipe the chocolate onto half the peanut butter cookies. Once you squish the top on the filling evens out.

Taste Report:

They taste like an inside-out Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup! I’m serious. Somehow the cookies taste like the peanut butter filling? They are SO good. Not too sweet by themselves so the addition of the chocolate filling doesn’t overpower you with sweet.

I usually store my cookies in the fridge to keep them fresh. However, these cookies did not taste as great cold. The texture really suffered.

Luckily, I only made a few in that first batch and kept the rest of the dough and chocolate filling in the freezer. The second round I baked off were stored on the counter at room temperature — those were still perfect the next day! We’ll never know how long they’d technically last because we ate them all!