Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies

These cookies are delicious. Dancing strangers in banana
suits will try and steal them. Don't let this happen. 

Peanut butter is interesting stuff. It's a key ingredient in delicious spicy soups and tasty sweet desserts alike. Also people slather it on bread along with jelly and call it a meal. There isn't technically anything wrong with this. The flavors go, it tastes pretty good, and it's filling. Also, it's super easy to just slather assorted goops on to bread and call it lunch for your kids, and easy is a valuable thing when you're a parent. I've seen parents. They need all of the help that they can get. Still, given peanut butter's versatility, it seems like we're not getting everything that we can out of this flavor pairing. Because peanut butter and jelly is straight up delicious. We don't think about it much because we associate the flavors with kids, and we tend to dismiss everything about kids because it helps us ignore how jealous we are that they don't have to pay rent. 

Ingredients:

1 Cup Peanut Butter (Now ordinarily when you're cooking you'd use smooth peanut butter. And of course, this is no exception.)

3/4 Cup Brown Sugar

1 Stick Butter

1 Egg

1 typically-sized human's pinch of Salt

3/4 Cup Flour

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

1/4 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 tsp Baking Soda

Raspberry Jam

More Sugar!

The first thing you're going to need to do is wait. Like, forever. Because you need your butter to be room temperature, and warming up to room temperature isn't something that butter takes lightly. It's got to take some time and really learn about itself, maybe travel the world and live a little bit, before it makes that kind of commitment. Eventually, when your butter is ready to settle down, punish it for its indecisiveness by creaming your brown sugar right in to its face. Sure, that may sound violent. But "creaming" sugar in to butter is really just rapidly beating the crystalline structure of the sugar in to the butter so that it rips innumerable tiny holes in it which trap in air. Anyhow, once you're done torturing your butter for toying with your emotions, beat in your peanut butter, egg, and vanilla. In another bowl, whisk together your flour, baking soda, and baking powder, along with your pinch of salt. Slowly add your flour mix in to your peanut butter glop, and stir until it's combined. Grease up a baking sheet, and start portioning out some cookies. Grab about a ping-pong-ball-sized chunk of your cookie dough, and roll it in some sugar until it holds its shape well. Put it on your baking sheet, and repeat until you're out of dough. Bear in mind, these things are going to be light, fluffy, slightly crumbly cookies, and as such they'll need some room to spread out when cooking. Overcrowd your baking sheet at your own peril.

Not pictured: The many cookies I ate before remembering
that I needed to take some pictures.

Take your thumb, and lightly press down on to the cookie ball in order to slightly flatten it and make a little well in your cookie. If you don't have any thumbs, do your best with assorted spoons or mannequin hands, or whatever's lying around. Throw those suckers (the cookies) in a 350 degree oven for about 35 minutes, when they darken in color and start to hold their shape. Now let's talk filling. For the most delicious results, take your cookies out of the oven half-way through their cook time, fill them with your raspberry jam, and throw them back in the oven for the remainder of the time. For the prettiest results, let your cookies finish cooking before filling them up with your jam. It's up to you whether you value form or function more. And, just to be clear, it's going to be delicious either way. Just one way will be more delicious, and the other way will be more the wrong decision to have made. I will say this though: if you decide to make the right decision and go for maximum deliciousness, bear in mind that the jelly is hot when it comes out of the oven. So even though you're tempted by the obvious awesomeness, try and resist the urge to just bite in to one because you'll totally burn yourself. With hot sticky jam, which will stick to you, and then keep on burning you. We both know you're going to do it anyway, but at least now you've been warned.