Peanut Butter Cookies with Milk Chocolate Chunks

I am a huge cookie snob. You should probably know that about me. I like peanut butter cookies, but they've never been my favorite kind of cookie. Too often they're too sandy, too dry, and generally, pretty unappealing. I felt that way about all peanut butter cookies until I encountered Ovenly's recipe for gluten-free peanut butter cookies. The recipe in Baked New Frontiers in Baking for peanut butter cookies with milk chocolate chunks leans more towards "typical peanut butter cookie" than towards Ovenly's, so I didn't go into this Baked Sunday Mornings recipe with high hopes.

The directions are a bit vague but simple enough. I converted all the cup measurements to metric weights, creamed my room-temperature butter with the sugars for a few minutes, then added my room-temperature eggs one at a time, followed by the peanut butter and vanilla extract. After that's done, the recipe calls for a pretty minimal amount of flour and then 6 ounces of "good quality" milk chocolate chunks. I almost used standard semi-sweet chocolate here, but Caleb convinced me to sacrifice his Theo milk chocolate bars for the cause.

After making the dough, the batter needs to rest for at least 3 hours before baking. I was too focused on binge-watching Stranger Things 2 to form tablespoon balls of dough before chilling it, but the dough remained really soft and scoopable even after a 12-18 hour rest in the fridge.

I've baked these twice - once for 10 minutes exactly and once for 11 minutes exactly. After 10 minutes in the oven, the cookies were crispy on the outside but still somewhat gooey in the middle, and they needed about 15-20 minutes of cooling before they could be handled without breaking apart. After 11 minutes in the oven, the cookies were almost entirely crisp all the way through, and to me tasted a little like burnt peanut butter. Even Caleb, who likes crispier cookies than I do, said that once the 11-minute batch cooled they'd be too hard for him to enjoy.

We both really liked the peanut butter cookie dough with the milk chocolate chunks, but only Caleb liked the cookies themselves. He says they are delicious, I say they are not worth wasting the dough on and I had to force myself through eating one cookie just so I could say something about them. If you like a typical peanut butter cookie, one that's thin and crispy and slightly sweet, you might like these cookies. If you don't like thin and crispy cookies, you may not like these.

Don't listen to just my opinion on these cookies. Head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to read what the other bakers thought.