Saturday, February 12, 2011

Peanut Butter Cream Cheese cookies

I was suddenly seized by a twelve year old memory of the peanut butter pie at the Glacier Brew House.  I believe I have only eaten it once and it was so rich I could not finish it.  Suddenly I had to duplicate the experience of the tangy peanut butter cheese cake  swathed in ganache ... in a cookie? 

I don't know why my brain seized on a cookie as the appropriate medium for conveying the experience.  There are recipes for peanut butter pies.  There are no recipes that I could find for peanut butter cream cheese cookies.  I know, I spent a couple of weeks looking.

This afternoon I went and bought cream cheese (and more peanut butter, I was running out).  I forgot to buy chocolate for melting and dipping the cookies in.  I may go back and rectify that, but only after I bake the cookies and find out how they are.  The dough is currently chiling in the fridge.

Experimental Peanut Butter Cookies

3/4 c cream cheese, room temperature -- not the spreadable kind in the tub, they add oil to make it spread.
3/4 c creamy peanut butter, room temperature
1 c sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder

Beat cream cheese, peanut butter, sugar, vanilla and the egg together, until lightened in color, two or three minutes.

Add dry ingredients, and beat on low speed until just combined. 

Cover and chill in fridge freezer (after an hour in the fridge the dough was insufficiently solid)for a couple of hours.

Preheat oven to 350.

Roll heaping tea spoon fulls of dough into balls.  This will be sticky but possibly less so if you keep your hands damp.  Place on cookie sheets, flattening to around 1/2" thick. 

Bake for 10 - 12 minutes until puffed and golden brown.

Or something like that.  As previously mentioned, I'm only at the chilling the dough phase now.  I will be editing with the results this evening.  The dough tastes like Reese's Pieces.

Edit: These turn out to be rather... inoffensive.  Peanut buttery, but not overwhelmingly so.  Nice texture.  But they need something.  So for the next round, I've put dark chocolate chips on top of the cookies on the theory that the chips might melt and and spread into a nice topping.  If that doesn't work, I may have ganache based frosting in my future.  Which would be okay, and truer to my memory of the peanut butter pie.   To be continued...

Edit again:  I never did get around to dipping the cookies in chocolate, because they got eaten.  The cookie victims, my design classmates were universal in their approbation, so these will probably get made again after all.  

3 comments:

  1. Thank you!
    I share your disdain for not finding a recipe for Peanut butter cream cheese cookies.
    I had this idea tonight to make "Peanut butter chocolate chip cream cheese cookies." and surprisingly there are not recipes and if there is anything you could possibly adapt, it calls for peanut butter chips, and who wants that, when you already have a jar of peanut butter :)
    I look forward to trying your recipe, I think I'll do an experimental batch with chocolate chips mixed in and see what happens.

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  2. I tried these and they are good. I would suggest adding 1/2 tsp salt to the dry ingredients as sugar and salt work together well in baked goods. Also, dust your hands with flour while rolling the balls and the dough will not stick to them. For a little change, I flatten the balls with a drinking cup dipped in sugar.

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  3. Anon -- you have caught me out, I definitely forgot to put the salt in the recipe when I wrote it down. When I make them, I definitely use salt.

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