Peanut Butter, Chocolate chip, Peanut Butter Chip and Reece's Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

Cookieeeeees, I love cookies especially when they are gooey inside.  These cookies are the holy grail of peanut butter and chocolate.  They have everything a peanut butter lover needs to satisfy that need.  

Right now Reece's has a limited edition peanut butter cup bar out that is double the weight of the regular three cups.  I have grown to love this bar as I was hard as a die hard fan to wrap my head around not eating the chocolate cups.

I found this recipe from allrecipes.com and made a couple of adjustments to suit my needs.  By the way this recipe makes about three dozen cookies; I made two dozen then froze the rest of the batter.

Recipe:

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 3/4 cup creamy peanut butter
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup peanut butter chips
• 6 chocolate covered peanut butter cups or two bars, cut into chunks

Cream the butter and sugars together.  Add eggs one at a time and add the vanilla. Combine the flour and baking soda and add to the butter mixture.  Add the chips and chunks to the mixture and incorporate with a spatula.

Bake at 350 for around eight minutes, the cookies will look underdone but will crisp up out of the oven.  Keep on the baking sheet for a couple of minutes before moving them to the cooling racks.

We ate them too fast for me to take pictures of the final product but here are some while I was making them.  Try them for yourself, they are worth every ounce of butter.  

All of the mix-ins

dough...mmm!

"Half Baked" Cupcakes

So, by half baked I don't mean stop baking them half the way through the baking time.  I mean Ben & Jerry's Half Baked Ice Cream.  Which just happens to be my favourite.

If you don't know what half baked ice cream is, it's premium vanilla ice cream mixed with raw cookie dough and brownie chunks.

I decided to make cupcakes based on this combination, and might I say while they are very rich and require a glass of milk, they are the best damn cupcakes ever.

The idea behind the cupcakes is a brownie base and a raw cookie dough frosting.  You can either make your favourite brownie recipe (it's fun to make with blondies and caramel brownies too) or use a packaged option.  All though I don't use a package too often, there is one that far surpasses the others. The Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate mix is amazing.

To make the cupcakes, prepare your recipe or mix to the instructions and fill cupcake liners to just over 1/2 full as they don't rise too much.  I usually put mine in the 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes or a little more.  It's hard to tell when the using the above mix is done because of all the chocolate chips in it (but no one got hurt from a little underdone brownie).  

Once your brownie cupcakes have cooled it's time for the frosting.  I found this recipe from Cupcake Project, I halved the recipe as you don't need a lot of this frosting, just enough for a nice taste.  What's awesome about this recipe and why you need to make it is because there is no eggs and saying that there is no cooking going on you need to shy away from using eggs.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough frosting

1 cup flour

1/4 tsp. salt

1/3 cup melted butter

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 cup white sugar

1/2 tbsp. vanilla extract

1/4 - 1/3 cup milk or cream

as many chocolate chips you want, remember the large ones have a hard time passing through the piping tip.  

Mix all together and add more milk or cream until the frosting reaches the correct consistency you prefer.

Pipe the frosting on the cupcake and add a cookie or chocolate chips on top for decoration.  These also make great mini-cupcakes, they seem to be just the perfect amount of sweet in a mini .  I found the larger ones were really hard for people to finish.  

Mini Half Baked Cupcakes