Super Duper Double Peanut Butter Cookies

Want to know something that may shock you?

My husband doesn't really like baked goods. He's just not really much of a fan. I had no idea of this when we were first dating... So when I tried to win him over with my cookies that everyone told me were incredible, I expected he'd have a bite, and his eyes would roll up into his head a moment, and that he'd sort of shudder in ecstasy then immediately ask me to marry him.

If I remember correctly, the first time he tried one of my chocolate chip cookies, waaaay back in high school, his reaction was something along the lines of:

"Hm. That's pretty good," and that was it. He... he didn't even ask for a second one. I was stunned. So! My mom and I conspired to have him over for dinner. Mom slaved for hours over an amazing beef stew. Jon sat down, and proceeded to sift through his portion until he had removed every last bit of onion. Then he sort of grudgingly ate what was on his plate.

He wasn't impressed with my cookies and he didn't like my mother's best stew. I was sure it was over. But, somehow, 12 years later, here we are, still together and going strong.

And I finally found a cookie that makes his eyes roll back in his head. So let's get to that!

My microwave is just in the background there, like, 'Hey, how you doing? I'm just so glad to be a part of the blog today. Okay, you can ignore me now. Thanks.'

Start with 1/4 cup each of butter and shortening and a half cup of your favorite peanut butter, and get 'em all friendly-like in your mixing bowl.

Yeah, that looks real friendly.

Chuck in a half cup each of white sugar and brown sugar (I used golden brown sugar here, but this recipe would be amazing with dark brown sugar, I bet! I'll have to try that next time.)

Once your sugars are all creamed in, throw in one large egg, mix it all up.

Pile your flour on top with some baking soda, baking powder and salt, and once that's mixed up you're almost done...

Except we haven't made it 'double' yet. Throw in a half package of Chipits Reese peanut butter chips. Heck, throw in as much as you like, I'm not going to judge.

Now this dough has to hang out in your fridge for at least an hour, because at this stage it is simply way too soft to work with. I know, it's hard, but you can do this.

Once the dough is chilled and firmed up a bit, scoop it out onto your baking pan (use a teaspoon if you're not insane enough to spend $12 on a stainless steel spring-loaded 1-inch scoop, of course.)

Gently press down on the tops of the cookies to flatten them just a smidge before baking. When making PB cookies without chips, I usually use a fork for this to make a pretty pattern, but the chips kind of obliterate the pattern anyway, I've found, so might as well use your nice clean digits instead.

These babies are ready to bake. Chuck 'em in the oven at 375 for about 10 minutes. Ovens vary of course, so keep an eye on them. As soon as they start to go golden-brown a bit around the edges they are done. They'll still be soft and marvelously chewy in the middle, and that is exactly what you want, believe me.

What's this? There was a tiny bit of semi-sweet chocolate chips leftover in the cupboard from a previous baking project? Aw, heck, throw those into the last of the dough, it's a party.

Oh man, look at these babies.

You really, really want to make someone's head explode with peanut buttery pleasure? Spread some peanut butter frosting on the back of one of these and press it to another to make the most astounding pirate cookie in the universe.

Oh my gosh what did I do to the lighting in this picture? I am not good with cameras.

For me, these ones with the peanut butter and chocolate chips in them were my favorite, because I'm a bit of a chocolate freak. And in my books, nothing goes better that peanut butter and chocolate. I didn't get to eat too many of the other kind, my husband kind of found them.

If you want to tempt your own loved ones, here's the recipe, adapted from one of my Great Grandma's ancient cookbooks:

Super-Duper Double Peanut Butter Cookies

1/4 cup shortening

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup peanut butter

1 large egg

1 1/4 cups flour

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt (half that if using salted butter)

1 cup peanut butter chips

Combine fats and peanut butter, add sugars and egg, beat with wooden spoon until well combined. Add dry ingredients and mix until soft dough forms. Add peanut butter chips (and any other add-ins that sound good. Peanuts would be great, come to think of it.) 

Chill dough for at least one hour, covered, in the fridge. Place 1-inch balls of dough on baking sheet, flatten a little with fork or fingers, and bake for around 10 minutes or until golden brown around the edges. Cool.

Ingest. Roll eyes in ecstasy.

Until next time!

Easter Egg Confetti Cake!

Hello and Happy Easter everyone! However you celebrate this holiday, I want to wish you and yours all the best.

I also want to show you this cake that I totally winged all the way through.

I have never made a confetti cake from scratch before. I kind of thought it was the sort of thing you could only do with a mix. Gosh, I'm silly. Sweetapolita proves how ridiculously easy it is to make over on her blog. I'm stubborn and wanted to do things my way, though, so I started with my favourite white cake recipe, the same silver white cake I used for these white cupcakes...

... and instead of adding the recommended 1/2 cup of rainbow jimmies, I chose Easter/spring-coloured ones.

... And then I added way more than half a cup!

They just looked so pretty while I was pouring them, I just kept going! But, hey, you can never have enough sprinkles, right?

Gently fold the sprinkles into your batter until well distributed, like so.

Then prep your pans! Or, if you plan ahead, unlike myself, you will have done this already. As you may have noticed, I have special silicone baking molds for this cake! These were a gift from my mother, she gave them to me with a free additional gift of heavy-handed hinting at what I should bring to Easter dinner. Subtle.

In any case, though I am usually a proponent of the grease & flour pan preparation method, I used cooking spray here because I was worried about too much shortening or flour building up in all those nooks and crannies.

The directions said to fill the pans half-full and bake as if they were layer cakes. The directions lied. I baked these babies for 30 minutes, as if it was layers, and they came out jiggling.

I had to let them go another 20 minutes before they were done enough! And by then the outside was a bit too crisp. I wonder if I`ll ever have success with shaped cake pans.

Worse, when I turned them out of the pans, the one on the right stuck and sort of fell apart. I don't know if I tried to de-pan them while they were still too hot, if my cooking spray was just made of fail, or if my over-zealous sprinkle additions simply caused the cake's surface to become sugary-sticky.

Most likely, it was a combination of the three. Learn from my mistakes, folks! Use good quality cooking spray, measure your sprinkles properly and let the cakes cool a bit before taking them out of the pan. Hopefully, that will prevent this same cake-tastrophy from befalling you.

I didn't let this setback stop me for long, however. Oh no, I'm much to stubborn to be stopped by a bit of crumbled cake.

Once I'd trimmed the cakes to be as level as possible, I set right to it with simple syrup and worked to 'glue' the cake back together. First I mended the broken stuck-in-the-pan bits back onto the main cake as best I could.

Then I spread a generous, and I mean generous, amount of simple syrup on the flat, cut sides of the layers. I carefully put the broken-ish half atop the whole one, cut sides together, of course, wrapped the whole thing in plastic wrap and stuck it in the freezer overnight.

Though it certainly didn't get any prettier overnight, it sure did solidify into one pretty stable cake. Even the loose bits cemented on pretty well. I let it thaw a tad while I got the coating ready...

That's one pound of Merken's light chocolate coating. My original plan was actually to do a glaze on this cake, but when I saw how much the (excessive) sprinkles' colours showed through the cake, I knew that it would be difficult to mask it with glaze.

So chocolaty coating it is!

I slopped a good blob of coating on the cake over a wire rack, then shook the dickens out of it until the chocolate formed a pretty even coat. I used a spatula to smooth the stray drips along the sides and placed it in the fridge to set up.

Once the coating was set - which didn't take long at all, maybe 10 minutes, if that - I flipped it over and poured the rest of the coating over the other side. After semi-vigorous shaking, it settled into all the right grooves. I cleaned up the edges and underside a bit with a spatula once more. You can clearly see the patterning from the cake mold, but the coating is thick & dark enough to hid the confetti surprise inside.

Once it set up in the fridge again, the whole cake was encased in nice solid chocolate coating, and by gum, it looks just like a giant novelty chocolate Easter egg! Am I ever glad I didn't go with that glaze.

Now, you could just stop here and have a fantastic chocolate-coated, confetti surprise cake, but I wanted to go a tiny step further.

See, I still had colourful royal icing left over from the baby shower and Easter cookies, and I kept thinking back to when I was a little kid, and the neatest part about Easter was getting a big hollow chocolate egg with my name written on it in hard, sweet icing, often with a pretty flower or two.

So, you can probably see where this is going.

The zigzag is simply the pink icing piped on with a petal tip, the blue stars piped on with a star tip, and the little flowers are the easiest icing flowers in existence - drop flowers. Maybe I'll talk more about them someday.

At the moment, though, I have stayed up way too late - again! - and really ought to catch some sleep before it's time for Easter Sunday brunch with the family. Of course, what I'm looking forward to is after Easter dinner, when I can cut into this baby and find out first-hand how successful this endeavour has been!

I'll be sure to let y'all know how it goes. In the meantime, have a fantastic Easter everyone!

Until next time!

Update:


In case anyone wanted to see what it looked like sliced up & served:

Yeah, that one big dot kind of slid off the side overnight... I really should have let it set up longer, but I can be pretty impatient sometimes, especially when we're talking about chocolate-covered cake. Can you blame me?

This is a cake best served with a nice dollop of ice cream on top. I think if I do this cake again, I may substitute a thin coat of raspberry filling in place of the simple syrup. It held together pretty well, but... Well, as I've said before, I'm not a big fan of white cake, and I found the flavor a little lacking.

What a super fun project though! Would definitely make it again, and I'd suggest giving it a try yourself, too.

Not sure what's next for the blog now that Easter's passed, but rest assured, there will be something new within a week or so, so stay tuned!

Easter and Baby Shower Sugar Cookies

Sugar cookies are becoming a thing with me. A thing I am making all the time. A thing I am having more and more fun finding ways to decorate. A serious thing, my friends.

At work, as part of an Easter fundraising drive, my co-worker Leigh and I were asked to make an Easter prize basket, with assorted Easter goodies. Leigh is the queen of fancy baskets, by the way, she can make an assortment of just about anything look professional, desirable and expensive, whatever the budget.

Me? I'm not so good at baskets. My immediate thought for my part of the prize was these:

D'aaaaaaw would you look how cute that itty witty bunny is - I mean, uh...

Let me start again.

Using the same outline & flood technique I did on these cookies I simply decorated appropriately shaped Easter sugar cookies in soft, sweet pastel colours of royal icing.

I kept these pretty simple & quick to decorate since I knew I had another task that same evening. My Mom sprang it on me a tad last-minute that there was a bit of a baby shower going down at her workplace.

"A baby shower?" I said, "I don't have little carriage-shaped cookie cutters or bottles or anything, what kind of cookies do I make for a baby shower?"

"Well," My mother retorted, cool as a cucumber (who the heck came up with that expression, anyway? Cucumbers are dorky at best) "You could do umbrellas."

So let's get literal here. Baby shower =

Babies.

Some of which appear to have gas.

And umbrellas to protect them from the 'shower'.

I spent a lot of time putting the details into these, simple though they are, so I can't help but show them off a bit. I wanted to make them as pretty as possible, I mean, how many baby showers are you likely to get in a lifetime? Probably not that many. I wanted these to be pretty special.

The yellow umbrellas - a gender-neutral colour my Mom specifically requested since we didn't know what type of baby was expected - I outlined and filled, and after they'd set for about an hour, I went back and added the 'wire' lines on the umbrella and the simple dot pattern, as well as the handle stripes and pole.

For the pink umbrellas, once they were similarly outlined, filled and set, I added little hearts in a somewhat random pattern.

And finally, for the blue umbrellas, what could be more appropriate for a shower than little raindrops?

Well, that's spring for you: Easter, rain, and babies. Keep dry, my friends.

There's a super sweet cake coming up soon, if all goes well, so do stay tuned!

Until next time!

Easter M&M Cookies

Before anything else, a quick apology for the lack of updates lately. The day job kind of started taking up all my evenings, too, so I was left with no time to blog. I will attempt to make it up to you with not one, not two, but THREE posts between now and the end of Easter Sunday! So I hope you like Easter stuff.

So, I went to Bulk Barn one fine day (you may begin to notice I do this a lot. It may or may not be my favourite baking supply shop. But I digress) and saw these:

Oh my, Easter-themed M&Ms! I knew I had to bake something awesome with them! But I didn't. At least, I didn't bake anything with the first bagful I bought, since my brother came over that evening, and all the M&Ms mysteriously disappeared. Neither of us have any idea how it happened.

So I bought another bag. This time I swore the M&Ms would make it safely into some baked good, or perhaps they were destined to sit atop lovely spring cupcakes... but alas, it seems they were destined to mysteriously disappear, bit by bit, over the course of the week.

This is likely one of those mysteries that man will simply never know the answer to, much like the mystery of how my socks keep going missing in the dryer.

Oh well.

So I bought a third bagful.

If you look closely, you'll see that some of the M's form little bunny ears, or sheep's faces., it is just too cute! There aren't many faces showing in this picture, but come on, you know I have more pictures!

But let's get to the recipe, shall we? This one is pretty easy to whip up, and extremely versatile. Much like many of my favourite recipes, it begins with butter. A half pound of butter. Oh yes.

Salted butter.

"What's that?!" I hear you say (in my mind, or is that just the regular voices? Hm. Anyway,) "Salted butter? In a cookie recipe?! Blasphemy! Atrocity! A travesty!"

It's okay, stay calm. One day, I went to bake cookies and had no unsalted butter, and thought, heck, I'm going to just go nuts and use salted! I altered the recipe slightly to accommodate the change and you know what? I have never looked back. A tiny but of salt brings out the richness of this dough, and really makes the sweet candies' flavor pop!

If you really don't like the salted butter thing though, hey, use unsalted. I won't hold it against you, but your taste buds shall ever wonder what beauty may have been.

Or maybe I'm being dramatic. I do that sometimes.

So, once you've creamed up your room-temperature butter of choice, throw in your 3/4 cups each of white and brown sugar, and mix it all up until smooth.

Then you'll want to add an egg and a teaspoon of vanilla, and mix 'er up again until you've got a nice pile of mush, like so:

Now comes your flour, you want 2 1/4 cups, and you don't have to add it gradually or anything fancy like that either, just chuck it all in, toss 1/4 teaspoon of salt (more salt? I know, right? Ridiculous) and a teaspoon of baking soda, then work 'em all together with your wooden spoon until you have a nice dough.

(By the by, you could probably do all this with a stand mixer. It would likely be easier, and taste just as good, so by all means, bust out the KitchenAid, my friends. I will envy you quietly, from afar, whilst I nurse my sore wrists.)

Did I mention there was going to be chocolate chips in these cookies? There's going to be chocolate chips in these cookies. This is about 1 1/2 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips. For prettiness' sake, I would suggest white chocolate chips instead, but this was what I had on hand, and honestly I prefer the taste of darker chocolate.

But like I said, this is a very versatile recipe! So use whatever add-ins you like. You could even toss in a cup or so of your favourite nuts.

Now, what are we missing?

Ah. M&Ms from heaven!

Told you there'd be more pictures of the M&Ms. I spy with my little eye... a pink little lamb, a yellow little bunny, and a sweet little yellow chick.

Gosh these are cute.

Scoop your dough out onto your ungreased cookie sheet. If you're smart, unlike me, you will line the sheets with parchment paper. The M&Ms that make contact with the pan tend to want to stay there. So yeah, use parchment. I sure will next time.

They did eventually come free of the pan though, and I put them on a rack to cool. They came out a smidge flatter than usual, likely because I let the butter get a bit too warm. Oh well, we all make mistakes.

They were still awesome. My evidence to that fact is that they disappeared even faster than those first two bags of M&Ms did. No mysteries here, though, I know they were messily, and joyfully devoured.

If you'd like to make your own, here's the recipe:

Chocolate Chip M&M Cookies
Adapted from Betty Crocker Cookbook - New Edition


1 C butter, salted, preferably Neilson brand
3/4 C white sugar, granulated
3/4 C brown or golden sugar, packed
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/4 C all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt (Use 1/2 tsp if using unsalted butter)
1 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 C chocolate chips of your choice
1 C M&Ms

Cream butter, beat in sugars. Add egg and vanilla and stir to combine. Add flour, salt and baking soda and mix with wooden spoon until a smooth dough forms. Add chocolate chips and candies and mix well into dough.

Drop 1-inch balls of dough onto parchment-lined cookie sheet, bake in 375 degree oven for ~9 minutes.

Try not to devour them all in one sitting.

I'll be back in a day or two with more treats! I hope these cookies blow your mind.

Until next time!