Peanut Butter Cookies

Cooking is my all time favorite thing to do, I spend hours in the kitchen coming up with new recipes and messing around with different ingredients, a baker on the other hand I am not. By nature I am a very spontaneous, impatient person and these two things alone are rather counter productive in the pursuit of the perfect pie. The other day my boyfriend, ever the optimist that he is wanted home baked cookies, I laughed and told him to go buy some. He reminded me of a time when we first met and I could barely boil water saying, look how far you've come in the kitchen and assuring me I could attempt this seemingly unnatural feat. I winced and shuddered, looked at a million recipes which are all different by the way and they all say, "the best" in the title but I finally settled on my favorite food bloggers' recipe at elise.com. So I took a deep breath, a shot of tequila and got down to business.

Things were looking good and although a little stressed I was looking forward to eating some cookies. Well, turns out I would be waiting 3 hours, yes, the dough has to chill for 3 hours before baking, a little test for my patience I see and confirmation once again that I don't like to bake. Three boring hours later I put them in the oven for 8-10 minutes (all of this mixing and chilling and waiting for 8-10 minutes??) and voila, chewy peanut butter cookies. I will admit these were totally worth the wait, they were so delicious and certainly well appreciated by my boyfriend but I really couldn't imagine doing this on a regular basis. Afterall, it somehow equated to preparing all week for a fun weekend at the beach with your friends only to find yourself in an aquasize class with your parents, a little disappointing.

RECIPE:
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 egg
1 1/4 cup flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

Whisk the butter and both sugars together until light and fluffy. Mix in the peanut butter and egg. In another bowl mix together the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.) Stir the dry ingredients into the sugar butter mixture and mix until all ingredients are thoroughly combined and the dough forms a ball. Wrap the dough in plastic and refrigerate for at least 3 hours. Preheat oven to 375°F. Seperate the dough into 1 1/4 inch balls. Place about 3 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet and flatten in crisscross pattern with a fork or potato masher (which I prefer.) Bake until light brown, 9 to 10 minutes. Cool on baking sheet for a minute then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

For chewier cookies, bake at 300°F for 15-18 minutes.

Makes about 2 dozen cookies.