chocolate peanut butter cup cookies

The internet, or at least as far as I’ve seen, has three favorite peanut butter cookies. The first is a thing where you take a peanut butter cookie dough or prepared chocolate chip cookie dough, press it into a mini-muffin tin, press a miniature peanut butter cup inside of it and bake them together. Nobody has ever made these for me and I’m kind of mad about it. The second is this 4-ingredient, one bowl, hand-whisked salted peanut butter cookie, curiously absent in flour, butter and leaveners, that’s been around forever until the clever cooks at Ovenly figured out that using brown sugar instead of white, them into larger half-domes, and covering them with sea salt raised them to the unforgettable. The third is a soft chocolate cookie wrapped around a peanut butter filling and bakes into peanut butter cup cookies. No wait, pillows.

I’ve seen them around for years. I thought I’d try my hand at them one day. But then in December, rumor has it that this cookie won the annual cookie contest at my publisher’s. And as a certain cookie — the gooey oat / bake sale winning-est bars in my second cookbook — won the previous year, this cookie effectively knocked it off its pedestal, oh, my interest was piqued. And by piqued, I mean, how dare it.

They always look amazing in picture but could they really be that good? I theorized that we liked the idea of them more than the taste. I narrowed my eyes at every recipe being an exact replica of the Google result before it, not a quarter-teaspoon of salt differential between them. How could a recipe be so… unscrutinized? I make a recipe the first time and declare it perfect, above tweaking, about once a year. But I made them to the letter and, indeed, they are fantastic. My husband and kids thought they’d won the lottery (I reminded them — ahem! — they already had.)

There was just one little thing. They were kind of pale. I feel with chocolate baked goods, one should go dark or go home. I don’t mean bittersweet; I mean intensity. I mean, I don’t believe a vanilla cake with two tablespoons of cocoa powder in it is a chocolate cake and never will. So, I increased the proportion of cocoa powder, and the cookies came out darker and more chocolaty, but not a whole lot. I considered going to a full half-half split between cocoa and flour, but suspected I’d run into structural issues if I pushed things that far, and instead used Dutch-process (a darker, more nutty variety that’s standard in Europe but sold here too) cocoa and you know how Mary Berry likes to say “why, you’ve really cracked it!” Well, she did not. But when I bit into the first cookie, well, it crossed my mind. They’re soft and brownie-like and basically just deathly good. I had three. Please come and remove the rest from my home.