Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies That Are Hard to Resist

Well, Bakers, today I'm going to show you how to make unbeatable chocolate chip peanut butter cookies. These are the only peanut butter cookie recipe you will ever need. It's so delicious and easy for the whole family to make. So we're going to start out in a nice big bowl and we're going to cream together our softened butter. Make sure that is sitting out at room temperature overnight so it's lovely and soft, just like this. And a little tip for all of my baking, but definitely for something that is using peanut butter is salted butter is the way to go. Now, lo and behold, we have a lovely, soft, smooth peanut butter. Look at that. Gorgeous. You want smooth with no added nuts. For those of you who prefer a better all-natural peanut butter, unfortunately they're not the best for baking. You do want something that's kind of like a standard store-bought peanut butter. They work so much better. Okay, so the great thing about this cookie recipe is you can use an electric hand mixer to do it or you can even just do it by hand, but I'm tired and lazy and old so I'm going to use my KitchenAid. Just cream those together on high speed until they're nice and thick and lighter in color. Doing this stage when making cookies, the creaming stage, is so important. You want to make sure that that butter is soft and that it whips up really well. When it is nice and creamed up just like this one, this is when you can start to add in your sugars. So here's our white sugar. If your mixture is not creamed to the point where it should be, it will be very hard to incorporate that sugar. So our white is in there and let's go in now with our dark. So we added in two different sugars there. We add them in for sweetness, obviously, but we add the brown sugar in for that lovely caramel flavor that works really well with the peanuts. Also the brown sugar helps provide that chewiness that this cookie has because it adds extra moisture in it. So it works really well. Now if you don't have brown sugar or you find it hard to come by, then definitely check out my recipe for homemade brown sugar. All you have to do is mix together molasses and granulated sugar and it works perfectly. This is looking lovely. This is the perfect time to add in our egg. A splash of vanilla extract. Lovely. And also a drop of milk. Perfect. Now let's take a break. So those are kind of like our wet ingredients. Here I have our all-purpose flour, some baking powder to help it rise and make it a little bit cakey. But then also baking soda which gives it that chewiness and that's what we want in these cookies. And then of course, a little bit of salt because cookies always need salt and something that has peanuts and chocolate will definitely benefit from that. Lovely. Add our dry ingredients into your creamed mixture. Just fold in the dry ingredients just like that. This is a lovely thick dough and nice and creamy too. It's really lovely to work with. Isn't that lovely? So that's our base. Now into this we are going to add in my secret ingredient, peanuts. But these are roasted and salted peanuts so they've got more flavor from the roasting and then also that extra bit of salt. So add those in there. You might be thinking like, oh maybe that's too much salt. Trust me. I have not steered you wrong yet. Go with the salted peanuts. And now milk chocolate chips. Now there is a time and a place where I like to use chips and this is one of those cookies. It's iconic for this type of cookie and then also milk chocolate pairs perfectly with the peanut butter. So rather than go darker, I keep it kind of milky so it's a real family-friendly cookie. Just stir those mix-ins in until they're well combined. I will tell you, make sure to use a good quality chocolate. That makes all the difference and that's what I did today. So as you can see, this cookie dough is a very thick one and actually doesn't need to be refrigerated before you scoop it. So that's actually really handy. If you want to scoop it then refrigerate it just to develop flavor, let them chill and everything that is totally fine. I often do that. So here's what you want to do. Get a tablespoon measure and scoop a heaped tablespoon and a heaped tablespoon it looks like this. Same amount on the bottom in the scoop as it is on top. So you're talking at around 2 tablespoons, one on the bottom, one on the top and that is a heaped tablespoon. If you're worried about the size, basically this dough will yield you around 28 cookies so just work towards that. Okie dokie. So when you put the cookies down, you want to just pat them down a little bit until they're around 2 inches in diameter, giving these cookies a little bit of space to spread out while they bake. Now like I said, I am a devil for freezing cookie doughs. I do it all the time. So what I like to do with my cookie doughs is, you know, I bake off as many as I want and then like this dough, you end up with extra left over so I scoop them, I put them onto a tray, I freeze them and then I bag them and I tag them and then I can take out one cookie, 10 cookies, 4 cookies, whatever I want and just have an endless supply of cookies to bake off fresh and they're great when George has playdates, when you feel like something a little bit sweet and I put a cookie in the air fryer, whatever it is, it just works really well. Okay, lovely. I'm going to save the rest of my dough and bake off one tray now so follow me to the oven. Bake your cookies off at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 180 degrees Celsius for roughly 20 to 22 minutes. You want to make sure they still stay nice and chewy in the middle. If you were in my kitchen right now, you would know that it smells sweet and salty at the same time. These cookies look gorgeous coming straight from the oven with all their chocolate chips and big chunks of peanuts. They're golden brown on the outside and I know they're a little bit chewy in the middle. These cookies are good any time, whether it be a family get-together, a special occasion or even just a regular old Tuesday. My personal suggestion is serve them with a big glass of ice cold milk because they are perfect for dunking. This is everything I want in a peanut butter cookie. It's salty, it's buttery, it has chocolate in there, those nuts are toasted and full of flavor. It's a little bit chewy on the inside. This to me is cookie perfection. If you love peanut butter cookies, then definitely give this a try and I'll see you back here again really soon.