Holiday Cookies! Part 3 – Peanut Butter Blossoms

Holiday Cookies! Part 3 – Peanut Butter Blossoms December 22, 2009

Filed under: Chocolate,Cookies,Peanut Butter — Veronica Baggs @ 9:33 pm

The last part of my 3-part series! Thank goodness, I’ve been baking for hours now!

The peanut butter blossom is essentially a peanut butter cookie with a Hershey’s Kiss stuck on top. This cookie will be filling the chocolate requirement for the cookie assortment I am giving away as gifts.

The recipe for this cookie can be found on the Recipes page, as well as at the bottom of this post.

Also, you can read Holiday Cookies! Part 1 – Shortbread Cookies here, and Holiday Cookies! Part 2 – Mexican Wedding Cakes/Russian Tea Cakes here.

Unlike my two other cookies I’ve been making (shortbread and Mexican wedding cakes), there are a lot of ingredients in these.

A bag of Hershey’s Kisses, butter (the original recipe calls for shortening, but I don’t like to use that), creamy peanut butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, an egg, milk, vanilla extract, flour, baking soda, salt, and extra granulated sugar.

Unlike the other two cookies I made today, I am going to use my standing mixer. First I cream the butter and peanut butter together until they are well blended. Then I add both the granulated and brown sugar and continue to beat until the mixture is light and fluffy.

I then added the egg, milk and vanilla and mixed until that was all incorporated as well. Since I’m using the standing mixer, I am making sure to scrape the bowl and paddle after each time I add an ingredient.

In a separate bowl, I have stirred together the flour, baking soda and salt. This will be added to the peanut butter mixture gradually; I did it one-third at a time, beating well between additions.

Now that the dough is ready, I have my baking sheet lined with parchment paper. The dough is rolled into about 1″ balls and rolled in a bowl of granulated sugar, then placed on the baking sheet. Unlike with the Mexican Wedding Cakes, these cookies will expand and you should place them at least 1″ apart.

Up until this point, these cookies are exactly like a peanut butter cookie. But unlike a peanut butter cookie, the ball of dough is not meant to be pressed down with a fork before it’s baked.

While the cookies are baking, I started unwrapping the foil from the Kisses.

The cookies baked for about 10 minutes – as soon as they were taken out of the oven, a Kiss is pressed down on top of each cookie, crinkling the cookie outward. Then the cookie is removed from the baking sheet and placed on a cooling rack.

Once completely cooled, the cookie should be chewy and moist, and the Kiss should have actually softened and is easy to bite through (due to the heat that was contained in the cookie).

So there you have it! All of my holiday cookies. The recipe is here: