Peanut Butter Chocolate Cup Cookies

With only a few days left until Christmas, I’m in full cookie baking mode.

My grocery lists consist of Ramen noodle soup and baking ingredients. Don’t judge me. 😉 I blame my Ramen noodle obsession on the fact that I still have food aversion from being really sick a couple of weeks ago. However, I do feel bad my husband asks me what’s for dinner and I have no “real” food to offer him. It’s all for a good cause… cookies. And who doesn’t enjoy a little college flashback with Ramen.

I always make at least one peanut butter cookie every Christmas. My peanut butter cup cookies are always a hit with everyone because it’s hard to beat a cookie with a Reese’s peanut butter cup in the middle. I highly recommend them for anyone that’s into peanut butter.

I can’t resist peanut butter cups so I needed an excuse to buy a bag. I mean come on, they even wrap them in festive foil for the holiday. To try something different, I decided to go with a chocolate cookie this time. I figure when you are imitating a peanut butter cup, you’re allowed to go crazy with either peanut butter or chocolate.

As a heads up, these cookies will test your patience. They are soft and fragile when they come out of the oven, which is the perfect time to shove peanut butter cups into them. However, they need to cool in the pan before you attempt to move them at all. If you take them out when they are still hot then they will fall part. I won’t blame you if you eat the casualties, but if you wait then you will totally be fine. As you can tell from the pictures, the peanut butter cups were still warm and melty when I removed them from the pan so I guess I don’t have quite enough patience, but the cookies held together. 😉

By the way, I seriously had to buy two bags of peanut butter cups because I wanted to make sure that I had extra for snacking later on. Did I mention that they are my favorite? Ramen and peanut butter cups… yup, I see some New Year’s resolutions ahead of me. Oops.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cup Cookies Recipe
(Make about 35 cookies)

Ingredients:

2 and 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (equivalent to 11.4 ounces)
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup cup butter, softened (equivalent to 2 sticks)
2/3 cup white sugar
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
35 miniature chocolate covered peanut butter cups, unwrapped (You’ll need to buy two 12 ounce packages.) (I used Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Miniatures.)

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease the wells of a mini muffin tin and set it aside.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. Set the dry ingredients aside.
In a big bowl, cream the butter, white sugar, dark brown sugar, and vanilla extract.
Beat in the eggs, one at a time.
Gradually beat in the dry ingredients.
Drop about 1 and 1/2 tablespoons of cookie dough into each mini muffin pan cup. I used Oxo Good Grips Medium Cookie Scoop to help consistently scoop out the same amount of dough per cookie. (To avoid confusion, do NOT put the peanut butter cups in before baking!)
Make sure to take the wrappings off of the peanut butter cups before they come out of the oven so that you can place the peanut butter cups into the cookies while they are still hot right out of the oven.
Bake them for 9 minutes or until the centers are soft. (A great time to remove the wrappers.)
Remove from the oven and immediately press a mini peanut butter cup into each cookie.
Let them cool and then remove them from the pan. Trust me when I say that you need to let them cool in the pan before you remove them. If you take them out while they are hot then they will fall apart.