Saturday, December 8, 2012

Santa Surprise Cookies brought by EW

2 sticks softened butter (aka 1 cup) 1 c. creamy peanut butter 1 c. brown sugar 1 c. sugar 2 eggs 1 tsp. vanilla 3 1/2 c. flour 1 tsp. baking soda 1/2 tsp. salt 1 pkg. Snickers (R) miniatures 1. Combine the butter, peanut butter, and sugars until light and fluffy. Use a mixer on low/medium if you want, but I use a spoon because it's good to burn as many calories as possible before these cookies are in your house. 2. Slowly add eggs and vanilla until thoroughly combined. 3. Sift together flour, salt, and baking soda and add them to the butter batter. 4. Cover and chill dough for 2 - 3 hours. 5. Remove dough from fridge and pull off 1 Tbsp. sized piece. Roll up and squash the dough wad into a puffy disk. 6. Place a Snickers (R) miniature in the center of the disk, then smoosh the dough around the miniature. Roll that glob in your hands until it's smooth, then place it on a greased cookie sheet. 7. Repeat steps 5-6 about a bazillion times. 8. Bake cookies at 300 degrees for 10-11 minutes. 9. Let cookies cool on baking rack or wax paper (says the recipe -- I cool mine on brown paper like you use to wrap packages for mailing) 10. If desired, spruce up the cookies by sifting a little powdered sugar on them and drizzling them with melted chocolate. (The recipe says to use melted Dove (R) Brand chocolates, but this recipe is trying to sell you things. Any nice melted chocolate is fine.) My hints: A. I actually use the "fun size" Snickers and cut them in half, they seem to melt a little better that way. Otherwise your cookies sometimes look like flying saucers. (Tasty flying saucers, but still.) B. For chilling, I divide the dough in half, wrap each half in saran wrap, and take out one half at a time when assembling. That way not too much of the dough gets warm while you're smooshing, wrapping, etc. Overly warm dough also contributes to the flying saucer effect. C. To drizzle melted chocolate, dip a fork in the melted goo, then whip the fork back and forth, sideways, across 2 - 3 cookies at once. This is best done fast. Being slow and careful here makes the chocolate end up all globby on the cookies. Which isn't the end of the world, but doesn't look as fancy.

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