Ho hum. Another day, another peanut butter chocolate sandwich cookie. This time I adapted the recipe that produced my favorite peanut butter cookie to date -- a recipe I got from Smitten Kitchen and that she got from the Magnolia Bakery. The first time I made it I was very impressed with the pronounced peanut butter flavor with just enough bittersweet chocolate from the chips to complement and balance it out. In addition to the great flavor, the cookie also had a great texture, crunchy crispy outside, with soft chewy middle -- basically everything a good cookie should be.
This time I changed things up a bit... and as far as I'm concerned not for the better. I didn't change the base recipe at all, but instead of peanut butter chips and semisweet chocolate chips (the first time I used Ghiradelli 60% chocolate chips and they were absolutely perfect), I used mini-Hershey's peanut butter candies, and mini-M&M candies. The peanut butter candies were fine, but the milk chocolate M&Ms just didn't produce enough chocolate flavor to go against all that peanut butter. :( I suppose if you like peanut butter more than chocolate anyway, you would actually prefer this cookie to the first cookie -- but I liked the first cookie so much better.
So, since I planned to make a sandwich cookie anyway, I made a chocolate frosting/glaze to go in the middle. At this point I was a bit frustrated, and couldn't find a good recipe anyway, so I just faked it. I melted 4 ounces of 60% chocolate chips, added a couple of tablespoons of peanut butter, 4 or 5 tablespoons of powdered sugar, and a tablespoon of butter. I probably should have just found chocolate glaze/frosting recipe, but no... I had to do things my way. The glaze tasted fine, but was incredibly thin and didn't go between the cookies quite the way I wanted it too. I was imagining something thicker and fluffier to counterbalance the flatter cookies, but that's not what I got. Oh well.
The bottom line is that I liked yesterday's cookie much better than todays. Not that the cookies from today are bad per se... just not the balance of flavors that I was looking for.
7 comments:
and all this time i thought we were friends.....hmph!
--jb
My kids would so love the m&ms in these! I wanted to try the peanut butter cookies from Smitten but haven't thought of it in a while, they sound good right about now!
haha these are so cute! not too sad about having missed it, since i'm not a peanut butter girl. but the cookies look super cute and colorful! :D
Wonderful picture! Can't wait to make my own batch.
They still look great!!
One of the best pics I've seen on Tastespotting. Fantastic!
Regardless, they look great...m&ms are my favorite...but I tend to go for a stronger chocolate than peanut butter flavor!
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