Peanut Butter & Jelly Cookies

I am usually a big chocolate person...if I have a choice of desserts, I am going to choose the one with chocolate. That being said, I got bored and decided to go to my favorite recipe website, allrecipes.com, and find some inspiration to make cookies. The first recipe I found was for plain cookies with jam in the center. Never being able to leave well enough alone, I thought the cookies would be so much better with peanut butter! I adapted the recipe I found a bit to suit my tastes, and here is what I came up with:



Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies

Makes about 2 dozen

6 Tbsp Crisco
6 Tbsp butter
1/2 C sugar
1/4 C peanut butter
1 egg yolk
1 Tsp vanilla
1/2 Tsp baking powder
1/2 Tsp baking soda
1 3/4 C flour
Grape jelly

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix the first 6 ingredients with a stand or hand mixer until creamy. Sift dry ingredients and add slowly, mixing just until fully incorporated. The mixture will be somewhat crumbly but should easily roll into a ball. Take pieces of dough and roll them roughly the size of a bouncy ball. Place on a baking sheet, spaced 2" apart, and make a well in each cookie with your thumb. Fill with a small amount of jelly, about 1/4 teaspoon. Do not overfill, the jelly will boil in the oven and you don't want it to spill over. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes or until the edges just begin to turn brown. Place on a rack to cool.



These cookies turned out so rich and buttery, and sweet but not too sweet. I buy reduced sugar jelly (no artificial sweeteners added), and without all that sugar it is more tart and not so overpowering. I think it really makes a difference. Overall, I think the recipe could be changed in many ways and is pretty foolproof. And they received the toddler Seal of Approval, so that has to mean something!