While I consider myself to be a skilled home baker, I also recognize my baking weaknesses and do my best to work around them. For instance, pie crust is my Achilles heel and I avoid making pies with pastry crusts if at all possible. I also shy away from roll and cut cookies, or attempting anything beyond the most rudimentary types of cake and cookie decorations.
But recently I saw a recipe that made me want to run to the kitchen to make roll and cut cookies with elaborate decorations. Namely, the website for Sweet Paul Magazine featured a recipe for Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cookies from Sandra of La Receta de la Felicidad, and the cookies were so incredibly gorgeous that I knew I had to make them myself. Sandra used cookie stencils to create beautiful designs in chocolate, a technique I had never seen before. I went to Designer Stencils, purchased a few stencils, and was ready to give the recipe a try.
As fancy as the finished product looks, the cookie itself is straightforward. You make the batter from butter, peanut butter, sugar, brown sugar, egg, flour, and salt; roll out the dough between sheets of parchment; freeze the rolled dough; cut the cookies; and bake. I used a 3.5-inch round cutter, and I got 18 cookies from the recipe. The cookies stayed nice and round during baking, although some of them developed air bubbles; I pressed these cookies down while they were still warm to flatten them out.
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While the tops of the baked cookies were relatively flat, they were not perfectly even. I tried stenciling designs on the top side of the cookies, but the minor undulations in the surface made this quite difficult. So I did what Sandra did, and I turned the cookies upside down so that I could stencil the flatter bottom side. This definitely worked much better, although my stenciling work was no where near as neat as hers. The stenciling was also extremely time consuming, because I needed to wash and dry the stencil between each and every cookie.
The final step after doing all of the stenciling work was to dip the edges of the cookies in melted chocolate, followed by a coating of chopped peanuts. Even though I need a lot more practice with stencils, I thought the cookies looked impressive.
The cookies had a nice peanut butter flavor (which of course went very well with the chocolate), but they were a little dry. Overall, they tasted fine but were nothing remarkable. I have definitely made better peanut butter cookies. But I have never made cookies that looked like this. I was happy with the way these turned out, especially for my first attempt at using stencils. It definitely won't be my last!
Recipe: "Peanut Butter and Chocolate Galletas" from Sandra of La Receta de la Felicidad. Recipe available at Sweet Paul Magazine.
But recently I saw a recipe that made me want to run to the kitchen to make roll and cut cookies with elaborate decorations. Namely, the website for Sweet Paul Magazine featured a recipe for Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cookies from Sandra of La Receta de la Felicidad, and the cookies were so incredibly gorgeous that I knew I had to make them myself. Sandra used cookie stencils to create beautiful designs in chocolate, a technique I had never seen before. I went to Designer Stencils, purchased a few stencils, and was ready to give the recipe a try.
As fancy as the finished product looks, the cookie itself is straightforward. You make the batter from butter, peanut butter, sugar, brown sugar, egg, flour, and salt; roll out the dough between sheets of parchment; freeze the rolled dough; cut the cookies; and bake. I used a 3.5-inch round cutter, and I got 18 cookies from the recipe. The cookies stayed nice and round during baking, although some of them developed air bubbles; I pressed these cookies down while they were still warm to flatten them out.
.JPG)
The final step after doing all of the stenciling work was to dip the edges of the cookies in melted chocolate, followed by a coating of chopped peanuts. Even though I need a lot more practice with stencils, I thought the cookies looked impressive.
The cookies had a nice peanut butter flavor (which of course went very well with the chocolate), but they were a little dry. Overall, they tasted fine but were nothing remarkable. I have definitely made better peanut butter cookies. But I have never made cookies that looked like this. I was happy with the way these turned out, especially for my first attempt at using stencils. It definitely won't be my last!
Recipe: "Peanut Butter and Chocolate Galletas" from Sandra of La Receta de la Felicidad. Recipe available at Sweet Paul Magazine.
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