Chewy Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cookies

This week I agreed to contribute a batch of home-baked goodies to a charity cake sale at work. This resulted in me still pulling trays of cookies out of the oven at 10pm on a Thursday night, and declaring I’ll never agree to this again! Cake sales should be on Mondays to give people a full weekend to bake at leisure!

Anyway, I’d decided to try something new (risky I know), and because at home we currently have a taste for peanut butter, I thought Hummingbird Bakery’s chewy peanut butter and chocolate cookies might be nice. I thought that they’d do well in an office environment too as they’re portable and you don’t need a plate and a fork to eat them! (These cake sales can get messy!)

Well, they were a storming success both at the work cake sale (they sold out) and at home (Craig insisted I leave at least 10 of these cookies behind for him). I can absolutely recommend them if you like the taste of peanut butter, which isn’t too much but is obviously the main flavour. Chewy cookies are my favourite, and these were so delicious and easy to make that they will definitely be made again and again! I didn’t even have any baking issues here, which is unusual for the first attempt at something.

Ingredients:

• 225g unsalted butter
• 200g caster sugar
• 200g soft brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• ½ tsp vanilla extract
• 240g crunchy peanut butter
• 340g plain flour
• 2 ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 75g chopped dark chocolate

The method:

1. First I creamed the butter (which needs to be room temperature and soft) with both types of sugar until light and fluffy.
2. I then added in one egg at a time, mixing well.
3. Then I mixed in the peanut butter and vanilla.
4. Then it’s time to mix in all the dry ingredients – flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda. By this point the mixture is thick dough, and my economy hand mixer wasn’t coping too well. I had to make use of a wooden spoon and my own strength!
5. Then, the optional stage, I stirred through the chopped chocolate, trying to make sure it was evenly dispersed.
6. These cookies spread out a lot in the oven, so they need to be spaced far apart on trays lined with baking paper. I rolled balls of dough about half the size of a fist, and I found that this made a good sized cookie.
7. They need to be baked at 170°C for around 10 minutes (or until golden at the edges). My oven doesn’t do this temperature, and found that 10 minutes at 180°C was right.
8. When they come out the oven they are still very soft and don’t even seem baked. You need to leave them a few minutes to cool a little before carefully using a spatula to put them on a cooling tray. They harden into the delicious chewy cookie texture as they cool.

This recipe made around 30 large cookies for me, so I would consider halving the quantities, or making the full lot and freezing half of the uncooked mixture (something I’ve done with cookie mixture before with success).