After this particular recipe I am now updating on a weekly basis, as I will be caught up with my current attempts at baking. I have one left for next week's entry, and then the week after that will hopefully bring something new and exciting into all our lives and more importantly our mouths and to a relatively lesser extent our stomachs, waistlines, and lower intestines.
Right, so I stumbled onto this cookie recipe while I was browsing for ideas that looked good but didn't require a Herculean effort or some sort of baking mojo I have yet to accrue. I went looking into these solely based on the title, figuring that they would be woefully complicated, however, given the name. Far from it, these little scamps have pretty much all you could want in a cookie - great dough with a bit of a kick thanks to the peanut butter cups, and once you know a couple of simple tricks they are bog easy to make.
Trick one - make sure you have some decent capacity mini-muffin pans to bake them in. That sounds ridiculous, but mini-muffin pans come in some pretty small sizes and you'll be baking these things way longer than necessary if you keep having to bake and cool off a single pan due to inadequate size (look, it matters, just accept and move on). With a single batch yielding 40 cookies, I recommend a couple of 12-muffiners (accepted unit of measurement from the Muffinological Institute of Oslo) so you can get the whole batch done in two bakes.
Trick two - handle the peanut butter cups (I used Reese's) with care and common sense. Try buy them as close to home as possible and not in the middle of a blisteringly hot summer day like some idiot (nobody I know, I swear). Once home, stuff them in the fridge for an hour or so before prepping them. This next bit is not part of the recipe, but something I read from others who had tried it and it should be considered essential to the whole thing given how easy it makes it. After unwrapping the peanut butter cups from the fridge, toss them in a container of some kind and then throw them in the freezer for a bit (pretty sure I did an hour or so here too). You may consider this a basic concept on the level of fire = bad, but once the cookies are out of the oven they are very hot and if you try and stuff a room temperature peanut butter cup into the center it'll come apart faster than the American economy tossed into a centrifuge. Even the frozen ones were quickly warmed and slightly melty on the underside, but the outer peanut butter cups retained the pleasant Madison-Avenue-designed shapes that helped sell the look of the whole thing.
On the food allergen and migraine front, pretty much smooth sailing straight on through with these. Kraft Peanut Butter in its original form has nothing of any concern. Shockingly enough, neither did the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which I had fully expected to contain some extraneous thickening agent. Nope, they are just as rich and as bad for you as you had originally thought. Oh, and these may contain traces of peanuts, so be warned. Ahem cough.
That's pretty much it. The cookies look a lot like a similar version I've seen around that has Hershey's Kisses stuffed in the middle, with the difference being that the recipe for the base used here tastes better and a peanut butter cup will kick the ass of a Hershey's Kiss every day of the week.
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