How many times have I shared my rigorous exercise when developing recipes? How I'll take pen and paper and magazines and cookbooks and devour ideas so that I can come up with something unique? Never? Really? Well, maybe because that's not how I roll! While I see many proclaim to be 'Professional Recipe Developers' I think my method is more organic and really not so professional in my eyes except that I might get paid for that work today. No, what I do is so typical of what happened when I came up with these Chocolate Dipped Peanut Butter Cookies with Pretzels.
I actually tested this, well sort of, a couple of weeks ago when I had some leftover sugar cookies I had made for my neighbors for valentines. I had piped Valentine hearts with vanilla frosting on dozens of cookies and had a small amount left on the counter. I also had some melted chocolate in a pan that right now I couldn't even tell you from what. I had the brainiac idea to combine the chocolate and vanilla because I wanted something different and then slathered it on the remaining cookies. They looked a bit boring after I had made more nicely decorated ones with sprinkles so I decided they needed more...nuts or something. I open the pantry and see some pretzels and the rest is history. Well, almost. When I saw that The Food Network's theme for today's #ComfortFoodFeast was Peanuts an idea started to bubble up from somewhere; the sugar cookies were now peanut butter and the chocolate frosting was a simpler chocolate ganache and voila...here are the results!
Not that I need a lot of encouragement to love Peanut Butter Cookies but this sure helped! I used my favorite chocolate to dip them; a combination of dark and milk chocolate which has became my standard. If you prefer all dark or all milk chocolate by all means switch that up. Adding chocolate was sort of classic but the pretzels? Not just a nice touch of salt but a great crunch; something that's not so typical with peanut butter cookies. Even here in dry Colorado, the amount of fat in a peanut butter cookies seldom sees them get really crunchy so this was a nice texture bonus.
Were they a hit? Well I've been tempted not to share if that says anything; I always give away desserts! They're even good for breakfast or were this morning. These cookies and a cup of coffee. Heaven.
