Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

One day I was extolling the virtues of peanut butter and chocolate with a very good friend of mine. You can imagine how deep this conversation might have been.

Doesn't a peanut butter cookie sound good? You see why this is an important conversation.

And then I was lamenting the fact that we had all this chocolate left over from Christmas. Don't get me wrong, I love chocolate. But melted down chocolate chips aren't exactly the finest way to enjoy it. So what if ...

What if you mixed melted chocolate in to peanut butter cookies?

There are obviously a few different ways this could work out. The chocolate could make the batter runny in the oven, and they might not ever come together. Or the chocolate could harden more like candy than cookie. And I was leaning toward it being an incredible runny mess. I like to stick to established, tested recipes. This is a pretty big deviation.

I started by making regular peanut butter cookies. The particular recipe I was looking at even suggested adding chocolate chips at the end, so once the cookie batter was together I added the great experiment: melted chocolate. I'd estimate I had about a cup to use.

It looked a lot like ice cream. The consistency in the mixer was a lot like ice cream. But it was obviously warm. I stopped mixing when there were still discernible swirls in the batter; any more and I think it would have blended together all the way. For future reference.

No special cooking here. Just the same as what the recipe called for (although you can see my bff parchment paper underneath the cookies).

These couldn't have come out better. The chocolate didn't harden into big chunks when the cookies cooled, and didn't ooze all over the oven. It was sort of like eating a peanut butter cup with a little cookie layer. Sure, sometimes there was more of one flavor than the other, but who is really going to complain about that?

They're especially neat because they didn't really require anything unusual. A little less mixing would make bigger swirls, and that might look cool. Or a little more, and no one would suspect they were peanut butter!