Peanut Butter Cookies

You forgot you have to bring something to the work potluck. Maybe you’re burned out at work and you just couldn’t deal with making those jokers anything at all, and now it’s ten minutes to bedtime the night before and you don’t know what to do.

Here’s what you do first – take two sticks of butter out of the freezer. Put them on a plate and let them soften on the counter overnight.

Then set up your coffee maker for the next morning, brush your teeth, and go to bed. You’re going to be up an hour early, and you’ll want that coffee as quick as you can get it.

Arise from your slumber. Shuffle into the kitchen and turn on the coffee. You’ll have this all mixed together by the time it’s ready.

Edibles:

·         One pound (two sticks) of unsalted butter.

·         Two cups of granulated sugar.

·         Two eggs, room temperature is best. If they’re cold from the fridge you can put them in a bowl of warm water. Don’t worry about it, the shells are impermeable to water. They’ll be fine.

·         One tablespoon of molasses

·         One teaspoon of vanilla

·         One cup of peanut butter, crunchy or smooth – whatever you prefer

·         One teaspoon of baking powder

·         One and a half teaspoons of baking soda

·         Two and a half cups of all-purpose flour

Seems pretty straitforward.

Hardware needed:

·         Stand mixer with paddle bit

·         Baking sheet

·         Two ounce ice cream scoop

·         9” by 13” cake pan – you will not be baking with this

·         Oven

·         Cooling rack

Into the bowl of your stand mixer place your butter and sugar and start creaming together. Start slow, then bump up speed to medium. Let it go for about five minutes until the butter is light in color and looks fluffy. Be sure to stop the mixer once or twice to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Then add your eggs, one at a time, allowing each egg to fully incorporate alone. Next in are the vanilla and molasses, followed by the peanut butter.

Mix completely, being sure to scrape down the sides every few minutes.

Turn off the mixer, take the bowl off the stand, and scrape as much buttery goodness off the paddle.

Using a wooden spoon or really stiff rubber headed scraper, mix in the baking powder and baking soda. Then add the flour by thirds, mixing in each third until it just disappears. Overmixing creates too much gluten, and will make your cookies leathery.

Save your leather tendencies for after the potluck. Or don’t, I don’t know where you work.

What if you really are doing this at five in the morning and you don’t want to wake up the entire house? Then use a wooden spoon or rubber scraper. This will take a little more time, but it will also build up your shoulder muscles. If you have the dexterity, go ahead and switch arms now and then.

Using your ice cream scoop, also called a disher if you’re a pedant, portion the cookie dough into the cake pan. You should get 24 nicely uniform dough balls.

One of these.

Should come out looking something like this.

When it’s all portioned out, put your cake pan full of unbaked cookies into the refrigerator, preferably on the bottom shelf, for at least twenty minutes. Set a timer. If you haven’t started preheating the oven, I suggest you do it now.

Clean up after yourself. I recommend putting everything in the dishwasher. Now pour yourself a cup of coffee and sit for a bit. Catch up on the news, maybe.

Or, you can roll the dice with coffee concentrate. Go look up the almonds entry.

Once the time rings, pull your cake pan of preformed cookie dough balls out of the fridge and put six of them onto your baking sheet.

A quick word on what you’ll be pulling out of the oven – they’re going to be big. Like something you’d get at a bakery or coffee house. Plan accordingly.

Also, remember to take picture of your finished product. I so wish I had. I truly do. They were gorgeous. 

I feel really dumb about that.

Assuming your oven has heated to where you set it, put the pan in the oven, reset the temp on the oven to 350, and bake for twelve minutes, turning the pan around at six minutes to ensure even baking.

When they come out they’ll be soft, so carefully, with your thinnest pancake flipper, love them onto your cooling rack. Now load up the pan with more dough balls and bake. Keep going until they’re all baked.

Now eat some breakfast and go take a shower. You’ve earned it.

Allow the cookies to cool completely (if you can) before packaging them up to take to work.

Assuming they’ve earned them.

If you do it right, they won't ask again.

And that should do it for this year. We'll meet again in the middle of January. In the meantime, and in between times, keep your knife out of the dishwasher.