Over the weekend, I happened to take a look at some of my long-neglected cookbooks stored in our home office. Between the two of us, Tom and I have so many cookbooks that the shelves downstairs by the kitchen can accommodate only the 90 or so that we consult most often, and the rest are stashed in various locations around the rest of the house where they mostly get ignored. I picked up Marcel Desaulniers' Celebrate With Chocolate: Totally Over-the-Top Recipes, and flipped through the color plates in the middle of the book. When I came across the photo of "Chocolate Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Cookies," I immediately decided that I had to try the recipe, and in fact, I'm a little surprised that I've owned this cookbook for several years and have never tried it before. These cookies feature two slices of cookie dough "bread" held together with peanut butter and grape jelly. I absolutely love this sort of whimsical project.
The recipe was fairly time consuming. First, you make the white bread dough (flour, salt, butter, sugar, egg, and melted white chocolate). You shape the dough into a bread loaf shape (more difficult than you might imagine, because it was pretty sticky) and store it in the refrigerator. Second, you make the chocolate crust dough (flour, salt, butter, sugar, egg white, and melted unsweetened chocolate), form the dough into a rectangle, chill it, and then roll it out thin. Third, you wrap the chocolate crust around the white dough center and put the entire loaf back into the refrigerator to chill some more before slicing and baking.
I think I should have rolled out the chocolate crust a little thinner, but I was quite satisfied that my sliced cookies were a reasonable facsimile of white bread. The light part of the cookies stayed fairly pale in the oven, and the corners of the cookies rounded out a bit during baking. The plain cookies were quite flavorful with a distinct white chocolate flavor. The inner part of the cookies stayed soft while the outer chocolate crust was a little firmer and borderline crisp.
When sandwiched together with creamy peanut butter and grape jelly, the peanut butter and jelly almost drowned out the flavor of the cookies. Nonetheless, the overall taste was delicious -- like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but considerably more decadent and sophisticated. Plus, the cookies were gorgeous. My cookies ended up a bit on the large side (3 inches by 3.5 inches) and so I sliced all of my filled sandwiches in half diagonally. When the cookies are sliced, the visual illusion is even more convincing. These cookies were utterly delightful and way better than any PB&J I've ever had!
Recipe: "Chocolate Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Cookies," from Celebrate with Chocolate: Totally Over-the-Top Recipes, by Marcel Desaulniers.
The recipe was fairly time consuming. First, you make the white bread dough (flour, salt, butter, sugar, egg, and melted white chocolate). You shape the dough into a bread loaf shape (more difficult than you might imagine, because it was pretty sticky) and store it in the refrigerator. Second, you make the chocolate crust dough (flour, salt, butter, sugar, egg white, and melted unsweetened chocolate), form the dough into a rectangle, chill it, and then roll it out thin. Third, you wrap the chocolate crust around the white dough center and put the entire loaf back into the refrigerator to chill some more before slicing and baking.
I think I should have rolled out the chocolate crust a little thinner, but I was quite satisfied that my sliced cookies were a reasonable facsimile of white bread. The light part of the cookies stayed fairly pale in the oven, and the corners of the cookies rounded out a bit during baking. The plain cookies were quite flavorful with a distinct white chocolate flavor. The inner part of the cookies stayed soft while the outer chocolate crust was a little firmer and borderline crisp. 
When sandwiched together with creamy peanut butter and grape jelly, the peanut butter and jelly almost drowned out the flavor of the cookies. Nonetheless, the overall taste was delicious -- like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but considerably more decadent and sophisticated. Plus, the cookies were gorgeous. My cookies ended up a bit on the large side (3 inches by 3.5 inches) and so I sliced all of my filled sandwiches in half diagonally. When the cookies are sliced, the visual illusion is even more convincing. These cookies were utterly delightful and way better than any PB&J I've ever had!Recipe: "Chocolate Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Cookies," from Celebrate with Chocolate: Totally Over-the-Top Recipes, by Marcel Desaulniers.
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