Chocolate Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies
May 14, 2008
Hello People!
Sorry I missed a day there. I don’t have a real excuse. May has just been a crazy busy month thus far and I was feeling lazy. I am human after all. A chocolate peanut butter obsessed freak one, but still human. :P
I made up for my super lazy day yesterday by starting today off with a bang, though! I woke up at 7 am and baked cookies before even eating breakfast. So take THAT! And the fact that I made these so early in the day and they were quick enough to assemble before low-blood-sugar crankiness set in, that’s gotta speak for how quick and easy they are to make. Especially for sandwich cookies, which can be quite tedious sometimes.
This recipe is from Everyday Food’s June Issue. You may remember me plugging Everyday Food recently. What can I say? It’s super! AND they shared a chocolate peanut butter recipe two issues in a row! They won some brownie points with that.
My taste-tester thought these were a tad dry. I didn’t think so at first but agreed after further “research”. These are still totally worth making though. Especially because the flavor is DELICIOUS! Seriously, these have that perfect balance of chocolate-peanut-butter-sweet-saltiness going on. Which is why even though my taste-tester wasn’t totally satisfied with the texture, he still managed to eat a few of them.
Here’s the recipe with some minor modifications:
I also increased the amount of filling in the ingredients because it definitely did not make enough to spread two teaspoons worth on each cookie. I was scraping out every last bit of ganache that was hiding in my mixing bowl, and could barely squeak out 1 - 1 1/2 tsp for each.
Chocolate Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies
From Everyday Food, June 2008
Yields 15 Sandwiches
Ingredients
1 cup all purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
6 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped*
3 Tbsp heavy cream
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1/3 cup creamy peanut butter**
1/3 cup packed light-brown sugar
*I used half semisweet and half bittersweet
**I used Jif & wouldn't recommend natural pb
Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 350, with racks in the upper and lower thirds. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda and salt, set aside.
2. Using an electric mixer on high speed, beat butter, peanut butter and sugar in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Reduce speed to low; add flour mixture and mix until just blended (do not overmix).
3. Drop dough by heaping teaspoons onto two parchment lined baking sheets, about 1 1/2 inches apart. With the bottom of a damp glass, lightly flatten each mound of dough into a 2-inch round. Bake until golden around edges, 12 to 14 minutes, rotating sheets halfway through*. Transfer cookies immediately to a wire rack to cool completely.
4. Make the filling: Place chocolate in a medium heatproof bowl set over (not in) a saucepan of simmering water; stir frequently until almost melted. Remove from heat; stir until completely melted. Stir in cream; set aside if necessary, to cool and thicken.
5. With a small offset spatula or small spoon, spread bottom half of the cookies with two teaspoons filling each; sandwich with remaining cookies, pressing gently to spread filling to the edge. Let set for 15 minutes before serving.
To store, refrigerate cookies up to 2 days. *I actually kept mine in a tin, out of the fridge and 5 days later they were still delicious. I actually think unlike most cookies that get worse with time, these got better. The extremely soft crumbly cookies firmed up just a tiny bit. Delicious.
*They aren't kidding when they say to rotate them. I forgot to do this for my first batch and the cookies in the back of the oven came out significantly darker. My cookies were also done in 11 1/2 minutes.