Erica's recipe for delicious peanut butter cookies.

Happy Halloween, everyone!! I hope you all had a fun weekend of Halloween parties and your kids got more than enough candy. Please show me pictures of your costumes... I LOVE Halloween costumes (especially pet ones)!! Speaking of pet costumes, Wes & I took Athena to the Spooky Pooch Parade at the Myriad Gardens over the weekend. Athena didn't dress up but we saw a bunch of other cute dogs who did.

Geppetto & Pinocchio on the bottom right was one of my favorites. My other favorite is a family dressed in rain ponchos. They were carrying umbrellas with stuffed cats & dogs dangling off of them. It was raining cats & dogs!! LOL I really wanted a picture but they never walked our way.

We met up with my coworker, Jennifer, and her dog, Martin. We've been wanting to get Martin & Athena together for a play date all year. They liked each other & had a fun time sniffing butts <3 

For Halloween this year, I baked peanut butter chocolate chip cookies for my coworkers. I baked these once for my ICP Presentation over the summer. (Everyone in my department had to do a presentation over some random topic my manager assigned us. Mine was beyond boring so I bribed everyone into paying attention by promising cookies after my presentation was over.) The cookies were a huge hit! I baked somewhere between three & four dozen and they were all gone by lunchtime. A few coworkers have asked for them again so I decided to bring that for Halloween (instead of candy).

I have the most basic recipe for peanut butter cookies in my recipe collection. I tweaked it some by adding crushed peanuts and chocolate chips (and removed some of the sugar content). Here is my version of peanut butter cookies.

Soft n' chewy peanut butter chocolate chip cookie recipe:
       Ingredients needed- 1 cup butter, 1 cup all natural peanut butter, 3/4 cup white sugar, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 2 eggs, 2 1/2 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 cup crushed peanuts*, 1/2 cup chocolate chips, plastic wrap
*To make crushed peanuts, put raw unsalted peanuts in a food processor.

1. Cream the butter, all natural peanut butter and both sugars in a bowl.

2. Add eggs and continue to cream together until smooth.

3. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

4. Slowly add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. I pour in 1/2 a cup of the flour mixture at a time while mixing. If you do too much, flour will fly everywhere!

5. Add in the crushed peanuts. Mix well.

6. Add in the chocolate chips. Mix well.

7. Pour the dough onto a large piece of plastic wrap. Shape into a giant ball, wrap and chill in the refrigerator for an hour.

8. Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

9. Roll the chilled dough into small balls and place on a baking sheet. The cookies don't expand too much so you can place them close together.

10. Bake for 10 -12 minutes. Place on a cookie rack to cool.

Mmmmm.... cookies!!!

How to use up raw pecans & chocolate candies...

Pecan cookies with chocolate caramel center.

I am now an expert at shucking pecans.
       At Thanksgiving, Wes went over to his grandparents' house and he and his grandpa picked pecans. I wasn't there but I imagine they picked pecans for appropriately seven hours and eighteen minutes while discussing the complete works of Krisnamurti. Wes returned with a large paper grocery sack FILLED with raw pecans (still shelled). I like pecans. I was excited. Raw nuts are expensive and we just got about 5-6 pounds for free! But I've never shucked nuts before in my life. I wasn't aware how difficult those little suckers would be to open. The excitement ended when I picked up a nutcracker for the first time. LOL
       Over the course of the next three months, Wes & I took shifts shucking them. We'd do a few handfuls at a time. Shuck nuts, hurt fingers, enjoy healthy snack, repeat. When we whittled down the amount in the paper grocery sack and had few enough left, we placed what was left in a Pyrex for storage. The time came for me to need to transport cupcakes to my Arbonne + RagsReborn party. The rest of the pecans had to go. Commence mass nutcracker pecan shucking party!

Text courtesy of Lacey.

After a night of labor, I was left with a rather large bowl of pecans. What to do with them? ... 

                                           

The literal fruits of our labor.

Wes' brother gave me a really nice (and large) box of chocolates for Christmas. I brought them to Christmas dinner at my mom's but we didn't get a chance to open them because there were already plenty of desserts. So, Wes & I took the chocolates back home and put them away.
       Fast forward almost two months ... today I remembered that I have a really nice box of unopened chocolate covered sea salt caramels just sitting in my kitchen waiting to be eaten. I had some for breakfast (they were delicious) and decided I wanted to use the rest for baking. I could have had more for breakfast but I didn't for the sake of my teeth and waistline.

There was only supposed to be 24 chocolates in the box but I got 25 when I opened it! Yay, bonus chocolate!

       I really like those peanut butter cookies with the Hershey's kiss in the middle--well, more like on top. I think they're called "Chocolate Thumbprints". I also really like Turtle (aka caramel and nut... not the animal) flavored desserts. A former coworker of mine would always bring "Trailer Trash Turtles" to our company potlucks. They're pretzels with Rolo candies and pecans on top. I've never made either thumbprints or turtles before but I imagine they're both pretty easy. And the two could probably be combined into one master cookie. Using that as my inspiration, I decided to bake some cookies with the Christmas chocolate candies in the center & crushed pecans in the dough. This is my first time baking these* & the recipe is mostly made up, except I used a sugar cookie recipe from a baking cookbook to get the correct proportions (because baking without correct proportions is disastrous). Wish me luck!
       *I will add adjustments to the recipe once I'm done baking...and if it's terrible, I'll just scrap this blog and post pictures of Sadie & Athena instead. LOL

Caramel stuffed cookie recipe:

       Ingredients- 

• 1/3 cup of granulated sugar*, 
• 1/3 cup of brown sugar*,
       *sugar cookies call for 1/2 cup each of brown & granulated sugars but I went with only 1/3 cup because I didn't want them to be too sweet with the candy in the center. The lesser amount of sugar did not affect the cookie texture or baking.
• 1 stick of butter (at room temperature & softened), 
• 1 egg, 
• 1 1/4 cup of flour, 
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, 
• chocolate caramel candies (make sure you have one per cookie; not all chocolates are shown in this picture), 
• 1/4 cup of pecan pieces, 
• a dash of nutmeg & a splash of vanilla (both are optional)
        I was able to make 12 cookies from this recipe. The chocolates were pretty large (about 1 x 1 inch squares). The recipe should be able to make one and a half dozen cookies if the chocolate pieces were smaller. 

1. Get a large mixing bowl and cream both sugars & butter. This is easiest to do with an electric mixer.

2. Once creamed, add egg, vanilla & nutmeg and mix together until everything is well blended.

3. In a separate smaller bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda & pecans.

4. Slowly add the flour mixture into the butter mixture. I always use one hand to pour while the other hand is mixing.

5. Wrap completed dough in Saran Wrap and refrigerate for an hour (more or less... I never time these things.) You can preheat the oven while waiting on the dough to chill. Preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. 

6. After chilling...time to make cookies!! Take a chocolate candy and wrap dough around it. The cookies will be little dough balls with candy in the center. 

7. Place the balls onto a cookie sheet (you can grease the cookie sheet or use parchment paper but I have a Silpat and I LOVE it) and press down onto the balls until the tops are flat. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until golden brown.

8. Cool and enjoy!! (but don't cool for too long...these are best eaten warm so you can truly experience the gooey caramel center!)

These cookies turned out so well!! So so yummy!! Especially for being the first time I ever made them. I have impressed myself. LOL If I had to tweak the recipe, I'd use smaller pieces of chocolate candy and maybe only one type of sugar. And that's only because they turned out a little sweet for my taste.