Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies

A few weeks ago my husband had a great idea for a fundraiser for his youth group kids to raise money for Snowcamp.

They should sell cookie dough, homemade frozen cookie dough, like you have in the freezer, he says to me.

I try to keep homemade frozen cookies in my freezer, ready to bake when I need them.

So he enlisted three women to mix up three different kinds of cookie dough.

I would take dark chocolate peanut butter, Whitney would take snickerdoodles and a gal at church we affectionately call Mama Flu took chocolate chip.

He told the kids to sell it.  $12 a bag for 2 dozen cookies, ready to bake from your freezer.

$10 a bag would go to their camp fund.

A lot of the fundraisers we do at church end up making one amount that all the kids have to split, so the beauty of this fundraiser was that the sky was the limit as far as how much cookie dough a kid wanted to sell.

I have to say that I was a little skeptical about this whole plan from the beginning.

First of all, Snowcamp is not cheap.

A kid would have to sell 60 bags of cookie dough to pay for camp.  More if you’re a snowboarder.

Secondly, who on earth is going to pay $12 for cookies that you could bake for yourself?

Apparently, a lot of people.

A lot more than three of us bakers anticipated when Taido told us we’d have one Saturday morning with the kids to make them all.

Nearly 300 bags of 2 dozen cookies.  Over 6000 cookies, people.

That’s a lot of dough.

I was in shock when Taido gave me the total last Wednesday night.

I figured I had better get up and knock mine out on Thursday because I had soccer games on Saturday.

Three days later, I was still mixing dough.

I kept closely in touch with the other two gals who were mixing, scooping, freezing and bagging their hearts out.

A few others did runs to the store and to the freezer at church to keep our freezers free for the next batch.

It was all kinds of crazy.

We talked about moving the deadline to give ourselves a few more days,

but Taido was out of town.

Conveniently.

With the help of a few seriously precious kiddos (four to be exact), we made our deadline by the hairs of our chinny chin chins.

And all the dough got distributed to kids on Sunday morning for delivery.

Now that it’s all over, I have a recipe for you.

Now, sometimes, when I give people a recipe they make it and it doesn’t taste like mine.

I don’t know why that is exactly.  They must be changing out ingredients, not using real butter, not mixing their dry ingredients separately, over mixing the dough, or using substandard chocolate.

But I need a few of you to pay close attention.  It’s not hard.  But I need you to master this recipe sometime in the next 12 months.

Because next year, I’ll be looking for some help.

Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies

Makes 4 dozen cookies.

Ingredients

2 ½ cups flour

1 ½ teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup unsalted butter, softened (2 sticks)

1 15 oz jar Skippy Natural Peanut Butter (no measuring peanut butter if you buy the right jar!)

1 ½ cups sugar

1 cup brown sugar

2 large eggs

2 tablespoons milk

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 cups Ghirardelli bittersweet baking chips

2 tablespoons raw sugar (for sprinkling)

Mix butter and peanut butter in the bowl of a stand up mixer.

Add both sugars and mix until creamed.

Add eggs, milk and vanilla.

Add the dry ingredients (mixed together first in a separate bowl OR just lightly mixed together on top of the wet ingredients is the cheater route)

Beat thoroughly.

Add chocolate chips.

Scoop onto parchment sheets in 1 ounce balls and lightly press with a flat spatula.

Sprinkle with coarse sugar.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 10-12 minutes.

OR

Flash freeze flat dough rounds.  (Put the cookie sheets in the freezer for about 20 minutes, or 40 if you’re opening and closing your freezer a whole lot)

Bag them up and pull them out to bake later at 350 degrees F for 15-20 minutes.  So handy!

Each of those cookies sheets has two dozen cookies on it.

Does it make you just a tiny bit sleepy to think about filling those cookie sheets 65 times?

Yeah, me too.