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Day 5 of The 12 Cookies of Christmas
This is always the first cookie I grab from a Christmas cookie tray. No matter how interesting the other ones look, I cannot restrain myself from scarfing down (whoops, I mean savoring) a peanut butter blossom. They are always so delicious!
I use the official Hershey Company recipe, which I tore out of a magazine when I was in grade school. It holds a special place in my recipe binder, and across the top of the page, I had written A+++++++++. That was the rating that 12-year-old Eva gave these cookies (I must have just seen A Christmas Story. Remember Ralphie's daydream, when Ms. Shields scrawls his perfect grade across the chalkboard?) Well, 10 years later, I think peanut butter blossoms deserve the same score. :)
My notes
Use butter.
Everything's better with butter. We tend to keep at least 4 pounds of it in the fridge. And whatever they might say about the dangers of this saturated fat, I present the great Julia Child as a counter argument. She loved butter and pretty much always used it in cooking and baking. She lived to the age of 91.
Get glitzy.
For a "glitzier" cookie, use a mix of granulated sugar and gold sanding sugar to coat the dough balls before baking.
Change the chocolate.
Substitute milk chocolate kisses with dark chocolate kisses. A bold, dark chocolate will also help the cookies from tasting overwhelmingly sweet.
Underestimate
The yield on this recipe says 48 cookies.. I got 36. (And no, I didn't immediately eat a dozen of them, haha) Is it just me, or do recipe yields always claim to be higher than they are? I used my normal 1" cookie scoop to measure these out, and still ended up short. How small do they make these cookies??
Another good recipe
A fun variation on the blossom cookie is to use almond butter instead of peanut butter.
This idea struck me last year when we bought a bag of Hershey's Almond Kisses (look for the gold foil wrappers.) I went looking around for a recipe online and found this one, which turned out quite well. A word to the wise - these almond cookies are just as delicate in structure as they are in flavor, so handle them carefully.
'Til next time,
Eva
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