Peanut Butter Blossoms

I wish I could say that for this Dessert Week that I made each day’s dessert for my loving, deserving husband, but alas, he only get’s the one posted tomorrow for his birthday (I’ll make a note for his next birthday).  However, we made these wonderful, scrumptious cookies for our very first 6 month anniversary (of dating).  It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work.  We ended up with a huge 6-kiss cookie out of pure weariness.  This is one of the classic Christmas cookies from my childhood, and is a lot of fun with a group! (Be sure to buy extra kisses for snacking, they disappear like crazy!)

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 C shortening or margarine
  • 1/2 C peanut butter
  • 1/2 C white granulated sugar
  • 1/2 C brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 t vanilla
  • 1 3/4 C flour
  • 1 t baking soda
  • 1/2 t salt
  • 2 T milk
  • Hershey’s Kisses!

Cream the first ingredients, then beat in other wet ingredients. Sift dry ingredients and gradually add, try not to over mix. And finally finish off the recipe with the milk.

Roll the dough into balls. Keep them small, maybe 1″ diameter spheres.  Then toss the ball into a bowl of white sugar and coat it gently.

Bake a sheet of these in a375 F oven until the tops are slightly cracked, this takes about 5 minutes. Be unwrapping the kisses now, if you haven’t already. Pull out the batch and squish down each ball into a cookie with a kiss in the middle.  Put the cookie sheet back in for a minute and a half more. My recipe card also states that a double batch of this yummy cookie makes over 100 cookies!  Plenty for you, the family, the guests, and Santa.

These cookies are yummy to eat right out of the oven (or rather, right off the cooling rack) because the chocolate is still gooey.  But chocolate is good in any form so letting them cool and waiting until after dinner is also a good choice.  One piece of advice I have is that if you are going to take these somewhere, say a potluck or a Christmas party, I would press the kisses flat while they are cooling.  This trick facilitates stacking and compact storage in a single container of a good amount of cookies and the least likelihood of a cookie loosing its chocolate friend.

I apologize for the Christmas theme in March, I’m already getting sad knowing that the holiday is so far away.  But these cookies are just so associated with the holiday for me I almost cannot think of them in a better situation (although I’m sure there are plenty of other great celebrations to use this yummy cookie for!).