I have always loved the combination of chocolate and peanut butter. I used to love the commercials of the kids running into each other, one child with the Hershey chocolate bar, and the other child with a jar of peanut butter.
The first time I tried these cookies, I was hooked. The recipe is a very simple peanut butter dough, with a Hershey's kiss in the middle:
1 cup butter
2/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 2/3 cups flour
2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
Additional sugar in a bowl for rolling
Chocolate Kisses
Combine butter, peanut butter and sugars; blend until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla; blend. Mix flour, salt and soda, add to cream mixture; stir well. Roll dough into quarter size balls. Roll ball in bowl of sugar. Bake dough at 350 degrees for 8 minutes. Immediately place chocolate kiss in center of each cookie. Bake an additional 2 minutes. Transfer to cooling rack.
You can add food coloring to the dough to create any color you'd like. We have made these cookies in red, green and blue. You can also divide the batter and make multiple colors for one batch of cookies.
Experiment with the many flavors of Hershey's kisses. They make a kiss that has peanut butter right in the middle. These are a wonderful addition to the peanut butter cookie. Hershey's also makes kisses with nuts in the middle. This is a fun kiss to put in the middle of the cookies. If you make a red dough, try the chocolate kisses that are part white and part brown.
We have also added peanut M&M's in the middle, instead of Hershey's Kisses. Follow the same recipe adding the M&M's at the very end and baking 2 additional minutes.
If you find the cookies a little sweet for your taste, cut out some of the brown sugar. Try cutting the brown sugar down to 3/4 of a cup.
Bon Appetite!!
