Small Slice

Here's my entry for today's virtual cookie exchange!

This is one of my holiday favorites, which I was introduced to by pastry chef Denise Elliot. 

I use the Mrs. Fields Peanut Butter Cookie recipe as the base (recipe in the extended entry) but I substitute chunky peanut butter for the creamy for the cookie part, because I like a little crunch all up in my dough.

Here's the assembled ingredients:

You may mock my organic sugars, but you may NOT mock my organic peanut butters.  Even if your family eats Jif or those other peanut butter pretenders, try making these cookies with real peanut butter.  They just taste better.  Same thing with the butter.  Don't use margarine.  It is an abomination in baked goods.

After the cookie dough is mixed, it will be very light and fluffy.  Use a small scooper or a teaspoon to drop cookies onto a parchment lined cookie sheet. 

Then comes the fun part.  Fit a pastry bag with a rounded (or star) tip, and fill it with creamy peanut butter.  Push the tip in to the center of each cookie and fill it with peanut butter.  You'll see the cookie expand a bit.  If you have used a larger tip, you can add a little dough on the top to cover the whole made by the pastry bag. 

If you chill the cookie dough, it becomes difficult to fill this way, so I would advise working with the entire batch of dough.  You can line a cookie sheet with parchment, and put 2 doz or more little balls of dough, fill each of them, and then cover with foil and freeze if you don't want to bake all of them now.  They will freeze well, and you can transfer the little filled doughballs into a ziplock for later baking.  They can go straight from the freezer to the oven (although I would advise a little rest at room temp before baking.)

Bake at 325 degrees until they lose their sheen. You'll have to watch them.  My oven takes about 15 minutes.  The edges of the cookies should be slightly browned, but they should not be over-baked.

Remove the cookie sheet from the oven, and allow to cool for a few minutes, before transferring the cookies to a wire rack to finish cooling.  I like them just like this.

However, if you want to get extra fancy, melt some chocolate and dip the bottoms of the cookies.  Then using your fingers, scatter chocolate over the tops of the cookies.