Peanut Butter Blossoms: or, The most psychologically powerful cookies I've found

I wasn't going to write about these at all, but they had an astonishing power over anyone who came within smelling range.

Peanut Butter Blossoms ½ cup white sugar ½ cup butter, softened ½ cup packed brown sugar ½ cup creamy peanut butter ¾ tsp baking soda ½ tsp baking powder 1 egg 1½ cups flour Additional sugar for rolling About 36 Hershey's Kisses, unwrapped Heat oven to 375°F. Have cookie sheets ready (lined with parchment paper if desired). In large bowl, thoroughly cream the butter and white sugar. Beat in the brown sugar, peanut butter, baking soda, and baking powder. Add the egg, beat until light. Stir in the flour. If the dough is sticky, add a little more flour. Shape dough into 1-inch balls; roll in additional granulated sugar. On ungreased cookie sheets, place about 2 inches apart. Bake 8 to 10 minutes, or until edges are light golden brown. When you remove them from the oven, immediately press a chocolate into the center of each cookie. Remove from cookie sheets to cooling rack. Source: Betty Crocker

Today's recipe starts with leftover Christmas candy. My family has a glorious tradition of giving everyone an insanely huge bag of assorted candies every year. We may not have selection boxes on this side of the Atlantic, but we find a way to ensure that everyone gets an all-American dose of sugar anyway. 

I decided to use the extra Hershey's Kisses for something better than slowly eating them throughout the next month: cookies! After all, is there a better way to do away with the fruits of the holiday season than encasing candy in more sugar with a lot of butter added in?

I've always thought this recipe was too tricky to bother with. For some reason, I was under the impression that you had to reach into the oven and insert the chocolates at just the right time, when they were almost but not quite done. It always seemed like getting the chocolate and cookie to fuse together was a matter of delicate timing. 

But as it turns out, you only need to shove the chocolates into the cookies as soon as you remove them from the oven. As long as you remembered to unwrap the candy at the beginning, there's no "knack" that only comes from several batches of practice.

As aforementioned, I wasn't going to write these at all. There's no suspense or drama in saying "I pulled a recipe from the Betty Crocker website and it came out fine." But the real surprise was the amazing response I got to these. One person plucked a single cookie off the platter, wandered off with it, and soon returned to load a whole plate with a pile of peanut butter blossoms. I tried to save some of these to give away, but that simply did not happen. 

But I haven't gotten to the most unprecedented part of this recipe: the way I was asked to make more of them. I woke up the next day to find the crucial ingredients casually sitting on the countertop, still in their grocery bag. 

This has never, and I do mean never, happened before. I regularly gotten recipe requests and dutifully write them onto the next week's grocery list, but no one has ever decided that cookies could not wait until the next supermarket expedition. No one ever fetches ingredients for me. What could I do but give in to popular demand?

Also, I have to credit the Betty Crocker people for their recipe testing and writing skills. My cookies looked exactly like theirs on the first attempt. I didn't do any special baking tricks or anything, I just followed the directions as written. It takes a lot of skill to write a recipe so that someone following along at home can get it exactly right the first time.

Furthermore, with a lot of recipes, one can never get their own attempts to look like the professional pictures at all. Either the kitchen staff did a lot of finicky baking steps for the photoshoot that didn't get included in the official instructions, or the photographers employed a lot of food-styling tricks that made the food look impossibly perfect, or usually both. However, my peanut butter blossoms looked exactly like the professionally-baked ones aside from my tragic lack of studio lighting.

We couldn't wait for the cookies to cool off. Therefore, we discovered that when they're still warm, the heat travels up the chocolate and melts it from base to tip. This caused a few of the cookies to get adorable bent tips:

But more crucially, someone else (I'm not lying when I say it wasn't me) discovered the melted-chocolate sandwich cookie.

One person said "This is the best version of these cookies I've ever had!"

I sent pictures of the peanut butter blossoms all my other friends who like cooking. Every one of them, down to the last person, said they were major nostalgia bombs. It seems everyone but me had these cookies all the damn time as kids. And everyone, without exception, wanted some. I am not kidding when I say I'm adding these cookies to my list of recipes for wooing. Peanut butter blossoms hit a powerful emotional spot I didn't know one could get to when baking.

After making two batches in two days, we finally had a surplus. I wasn't sure if you can freeze them without the Kisses getting that powdery white coating on them (which is still fine to eat, although it detracts from the cuteness). In case anyone is wondering, you can freeze peanut butter blossoms for at least a week, and they will be as good as fresh.