Milk & Cookies

I’m not referring to MY hubby, because he says pretzels don’t belong in sweet things. But any other hubby who eats these will surely become chubby. These are your basic chocolate chip cookie except with less chocolate chips and additional peanut butter chips and pretzel pieces. They’re not very photogenic and I don’t have a ton of pictures, so I will start with a picture of my adorable kitten, Maya, sniffing the flowers that our friend Liz gave us.

Chubby Maya

For the recipe, I started with one from Recipezaar and made a couple changes:

cookie dough

-1 cup butter

-1/2 cup sugar

-1/2 cup brown sugar

-1 egg

-1 Tbsp. vanilla

-2 cups flour

-1/2 tsp. baking soda

-1 pinch salt

-1 1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

-1 cup peanut butter chips

-1 cup pretzel pieces (about the same size as the chocolate chips)

Stalking half-baked cookies

Do exactly what you would do if you were making chocolate chip cookies: Mash butter and sugar, add egg and vanilla, mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl and then stir them into the butter and sugar, add the chips & pretzels, stir, bake at 350 F for 11 minutes until edges barely start to brown and middle is still soft and pale colored.

Well, I really like these cookies, but they make me crave the real Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby. I may have to invest in some vanilla ice cream to eat with these!

Can you smell the fresh baked cookies?

This is one of the simplest recipes I have tried yet. There are only 5 ingredients! Yet somehow they ended up being one of the most difficult cookies to make. Don’t let that throw you off though… these cookies are worth it. Once again, this recipe is comes from Joy the Baker (you will soon realize this is a running theme), and once again, the cookies are delicious.

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients (makes about 24 cookies)

1 cup 100% Natural Peanut Butter
(I used creamy)
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 tspn. baking soda
(I made a double batch)

Directions

Mix the peanut butter and the two types of sugars in a large mixing bowl. Sounds simple? Well its not. These ingredients simply do not like to be mixed. I mixed them as well as I could for about 2 minutes, but they turned into a crumbly sticky mess. Maybe the next step will help?

Add the egg and baking soda and mix for another 2 minutes. I was hoping that the egg would help make this mixture turn into more of a dough, but it didn’t.  The end result was thick and very crumbly. My mixer was struggling just to keep turning. Oh well, faith in Joy the Baker kept me going.

Preheat your oven to 250°F and get a baking tray ready with some parchment paper.

Form the “dough” into balls about 1″ in diameter. Do not be discouraged by the doughs lack of effort. If you just commit to getting your hands in there, the dough ends up being fairly mold-able. Also, I found that when it comes time to place them on the tray and mush them with a fork, they are very happy to break apart into many pieces. To minimize this, I started making little disks instead of balls. This way the fork doesn’t need to be pressed down quite as deep and the cookie holds its shape better. You should be able to get 12-15 cookies on a standard cookie tray.

Bake the cookies for 8-9 minutes. I tried going for 10 minutes and felt that the cookies were just a bit too well done. The next batch came out a bit early and they were soft and chewy and just perfect. The cookies will harden a bit after you take them out of the oven, so let them sit for a few minutes before you move them.

In the end, I think these cookies were worth the extra effort. As an optional upgrade you can try placing some chocolate on the top of each cookie before you bake it.