Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Shortbread

I have been overwhelmed in the past week or so to the response to my Reese’s Peanut Butter Bars. God bless Pinterest. As a thank you to everyone who’s expressed their delight at the peanut butter/chocolatey goodness of those treats, I bring you another equally decadent dessert.  These buttery, melt-in-your-mouth shortbread cookies are infused with rich peanut butter and a smattering of sweet chocolate chips. Oh baby.

First we mix together ingredients into a nice dough. Pretty standard shortbread stuff. Butter, flour – but we add in peanut butter and chocolate chips.

Turn it out onto wax paper and form it into a log. Twist the ends to get it nice and tightly wrapped. Here’s my trick for keeping logs of dough from getting flat on one side. Cut a paper towel roll lengthwise and slide the dough in there like a little sleeve. Perfect!

Allow to chill, then slice into disks. The dough is a little crumbly.  Depending on how sharp your knife is and how many chocolate chips you hit cutting each slice you may have to moosh the dough back into a round. Don’t worry if they aren’t perfect. Mine certainly weren’t.

Put your disks onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or a slipat and bake.

Don’t let them brown, they’ll look a little underdone, but that’s what you want for that hit-your-tongue-and-dissolve quality we’re going for here.

Yummmmmm! You’ll probably want a glass of cold milk with these. They are incredibly rich and delicious.

An old co-worker of my husband complained this week about the bias towards whoever works with Zack getting all kinds of treats sent in. Funny…he didn’t ever complain when he was the recipient of all the goodies. In the box! Off to work they go!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Shortbread Cookies
From The View from the Great Island
makes about 21 small cookies

1 stick, (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, room temp
1/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup confectioner’s sugar
scant 1/2 tsp sea salt
3/4 cup milk chocolate chips

• Cream the butter and the peanut butter together in a stand mixer, with a hand mixer, or a wooden spoon.  Beat in the vanilla.
• Whisk the dry ingredients together and add to the butter mixture.  Mix until the dough comes together.
• Stir in the chips, and turn the dough out onto a piece of waxed paper.  Gently pull the dough together and form it into a log.  If it is still crumbly, work it with your hands until it holds together smoothly. Roll it up in the paper, smoothing the shape as you go.  Twist the ends securely and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.
• Slice the log into slices with a sharp knife. Not too thick, not too thin, about 1/3 inch.  If a slice crumbles a bit, just smoosh the dough back together.  These don’t have to be perfect disks.
• Bake on a parchment or silpat lined baking sheet at 325 for about 12-14 minutes.  The cookies will  not be browned, and they may look undone, but don’t over bake.  One of the joys of shortbread cookies is that they fall apart and melt in your mouth.
• Let the cookies cool on the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a rack.