baked! the most ridiculous peanut butter cookies ever.

i haven't been feeling too well this week, friends, but that hasn't stopped me from cookie-baking -- it's just slowed down the process a little.

i've been dying to try molly's salted peanut butter cookies since she posted the recipe a few months ago. i'd actually been looking for a good peanut butter cookie recipe for awhile, and in that search had made a batch of peanut butter cookies prior to reading molly's recipe that were sadly subpar -- quick, yes, but lacking the substance i've come to love in my favorite cookies (in other words, lacking the butter, brown sugar, white sugar and chocolate -- oh, chocolate -- that this recipe includes). they were, in a word, disappointing. i almost gave up the search. then i found this recipe and decided i had to try it. i was just waiting for the right time.

turns out, tuesday night was the right time.

in spite of not feeling great, i got to baking after a quick trip to whole foods to purchase some fancy chocolate (i figured hey, why not go all out for this recipe?). i measured, i mixed, i chopped chocolate and i even used my handy-dandy ice cream scoop to make sure the cookies were perfectly round (and, honestly, to make sure they were large-sized). i knew when i tasted the dough and discovered that it tasted like the peanut butter inside a reese's peanut butter cup that these were going to be good cookies.

i was not disappointed.

if you want to try them yourself, the recipe's here. the dough comes together quickly -- not unlike any other cookie recipe -- but the key is to use a natural peanut butter (which will provide a more authentic, stronger peanut flavor) and good-quality chocolate (i normally use ghirardelli for everything and love it, but i really think the theo chocolate i bought added something to these cookies). also, as molly notes, you want to use milk chocolate here instead of semisweet or bittersweet. i use ghirardelli 60 percent bittersweet chips for my chocolate-chip cookies and would be hard-pressed to change that, but again: the milk chocolate takes these particular cookies from awesome to other-worldly. if you try them, please let me know how you like them.

photo by me