Baked Sunday Mornings: Peanut Butter Blossoms

The recipe on this week's Baked Sunday Mornings schedule is the Baked Ultimate Birthday Cake, a very vanilla cake with a massive amount of rainbow sprinkles. I've made this cake a few times before, and I absolutely love it. It's delicious, super-festive, and appropriate for any celebration ranging from an office party to a child's birthday. But since I've already blogged about the birthday cake, I thought I would write about another recipe from Baked Occasions this week -- the Peanut Butter Blossoms.

Even though this is a classic recipe, I have never made these cookies before. I baked them for our holiday party; they are, after all, included in the "Holiday Baking Interlude" section of the cookbook. (I had briefly considered making the Lebkuchen recipe instead, but I thought that yet another European spice cookie with honey and candied orange peel -- on top of the leckerli and panforte -- might be overkill.)

These cookies come together quickly. You beat shortening and butter; add smooth peanut butter, followed by granulated sugar and dark brown sugar; add egg, milk, and vanilla; and mix in the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt). My dough was a nice consistency that I could scoop right away without chilling. I used a #50 scoop (getting 60 cookies from a double batch of dough) and rolled each cookie in demerara sugar before baking. I baked the cookies for 10 minutes, and pressed a Special Dark Hershey's Kiss on top of each one right after taking the cookies out of the oven.
There's a reason these cookies are a classic -- what's not to like about a peanut butter cookie paired with a Hershey's Kiss? And I lost count of how many people are our holiday party commented that their mother used to bake this cookie. The cookie is quite firm -- a necessity, I suppose, to secure the Hershey's Kiss -- but very tasty, and I liked the bit of crunch from the demerara sugar coating. These are crowd-pleasers for the holidays or any time of year.

Recipe: "Peanut Butter Blossoms" from Baked Occasions by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

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Robyn said…
I love these cookies! Haven't made the Baked version yet, but I look forward to it!