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!).

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

Welcome to Dessert Week!  In celebration of my husband’s birthday this Friday I will be sharing some of his (and my) favorite recipes all week long.

I’ll start off with one we made for the first time last night.  I got the recipe out of the 1981 Deseret Recipes.  I really like this book because it gives me simple ideas, not all the convoluted 25-ingredient recipes of other books.  This is mainly a food-storage and simple vegetables kind of book.  I made the peanut butter oatmeal cookies. The following is the recipe cut into thirds (it originally made “9 dozen” cookies, we are only 2 people, have mercy!)

Ingredients:

  • 1 stick of softened margarine or 1/2 C soft shortening
  • 1/3 C granulated white sugar
  • 1/2 C brown sugar, packed
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 C peanut butter
  • 1 C all-purpose flour (actually 1 1/6, so a heaping cup?)
  • 2/3 t baking soda (again, eyeball more than a half teaspoon)
  • 1/4 t salt
  • 2/3 C oatmeal, uncooked

Beat first set of ingredients until smooth, then beat in the egg and peanut butter one at a time.  Now add the flour and its buddies.  And finally add the oatmeal.

Bake at 350 F for 12 to 15 minutes.

I loved plopping these cookies, the batter was held together nicely by the peanut butter.  However, this also resulted in a sort of dry cookie, but we both concluded they were perfect with a glass of milk!  Jacob had the same luck when he scraped them off, nice and clean.  Maybe I need to add more flour to my other cookie recipes, since they are always so flat and sticky.  Jacob agrees we should make them again, so one more recipe on the favorites list.