Rich, crumbly peanut butter cookies with a bit of crunch and a bit of sweet jelly to cut through it all.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!
I’ve OFFICIALLY launched my Facebook page! I highly encourage each and every one of you to follow the page Flour and Sunflowers for updates whenever I publish a new post. I set up a system to automatically post new blog links over on that page, so you can follow it and click the button to enable notifications, and you’ll see them all in your feed right away. Plus, I’ll be there to respond to your comments! I’d love it if all of you followed me, and shared my posts and page so your friends can follow me too. Thanks!
Alright, now on with your regularly scheduled recipe…
In my review for Japanese Milk Bread, I mentioned that part of my motivation for starting a cooking blog was that bread. It was tasty, it was complex but not too bad, and it was extremely photogenic. I was feeling good about it, back at the start of the pandemic (a whole year ago!) and I was thinking. What else can I do?
I was browsing Facebook, as you do, and I came across a Reddit post, as you do. I ended up on Reddit browsing food, and came across a recipe for these cookies. Stuffed cookies!
I immediately started thinking about all of the different things I could do with a cookie recipe like this. PB&J is just the start. I could add in apple and cinnamon and make a little apple pie. I could add some hot fudge, a bit of marshmallow, and some graham cracker crumbs for a smores cookie. I could make chocolate cookies rather than peanut butter, and stuff them with raspberry jam…
Needless to say, I was inspired. And yet, somehow, in the flurry of actually starting the blog… I never ended up making these cookies! As it turns out, I had bookmarked the recipe, but forgotten about it and lost it in my bookmarks.
Well, all of that changed today. I was looking for a dessert to make for our weekly Bad Movie Night, and I had already made some fantastic chocolate cookies (which I might blog about later.) I hadn’t made peanut butter cookies in a while — not since the Monster Cookies — so I decided to find something new. That led me to rediscovering this recipe in my bookmarks, and here we are!
The recipe itself is fairly simple, but the construction of the cookies is the tricky part. You make a peanut butter cookie dough, then flatten it and add your dollops of crunchy PB and jelly, then fold it up like a dumpling to bake. They flatten and spread out really well! Almost too well; I couldn’t do more than four at a time, I just didn’t have the space on my cookie sheets.
They didn’t turn out as gooey as the other recipes I’ve seen online, but that was perfectly fine. My only complaint is that, the way I put the jelly off to the side like in the picture above, only half the cookie really had jelly in it. Next time I make these — and there WILL be a next time — I’ll definitely position it better for a more even distribution.
Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies
Equipment
- Mixer
- Rubber Spatula
- Baking Sheet
- Silicone Baking Mat (or parchment paper)
Ingredients
- 10 Tbsp Crunchy Peanut Butter Divided into 1 Tbsp Dollops
- 1½ Cups All-Purpose Flour
- 1½ Tsp Baking Soda
- 1 Tsp Kosher Salt
- 1 Cup Creamy Peanut Butter
- ½ Cup White Sugar
- ½ Cup Light Brown Sugar
- ½ Cup Butter One stick
- 2 Eggs
- 1½ Tsp Vanilla Extract
- 10 Tsp Strawberry Jam Any jelly/jam that works for your tastes.
Instructions
- Divide the crunchy peanut butter into 10 equal size dollops. Place in the freezer until ready to use, for ease of handling.
- Preheat oven to 375°F
- In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt.
- In your mixer bowl, add the creamy peanut butter, white and brown sugars, and butter. Beat on medium until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
- Add the eggs to the mixer one at a time, beating to incorporate each time. Once mixed together, add the vanilla and beat until smooth.
- Add the dry ingredients to the mixture and continue beating until fully incorporated.
- Remove the dough from the mixer and divide into 10 equal-sized balls. Place on a baking mat to work with one at a time.
- One at a time, pick up a ball of dough and flatten into a three-inch circle. Add a teaspoon of jam and one dollop of crunchy peanut butter. Wrap the dough around the filling, pressing together and re-forming into a sphere.
- Arrange cookies on baking mat or parchment-lined baking sheet with plenty of room to spare. They will flatten and expand while they bake.
- Bake for 16 minutes, or until golden on top. Remove from oven, allow to cool, and serve.
Okay for the cookies, but now you really MUST tell about weekly “Bad Movie Nights”. What movies have you watched that fall in that category?