Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies

Discs of Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter are stuffed into the middle of a no chill chocolate chip cookie for the most perfect peanut butter stuffed cookie situation.

Hi hi! Happy Saturday! I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a struggle to get back into the swing of things after the New Year. I picked up a super cute case of bronchitis, so it’s been a bit of a mission to get back into something that resembles regular life and routine (whatever that is). I have to remind myself that this happens every January, and it will soon pass!

I wanted to start off this year with a couple of jazzed up simple recipes, and what better place to start than with these Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies? These guys are massive, super easy to make, and the cookies don’t require any chilling, meaning that you can have these ready to eat ASAP.

Before we get into it, I want to tell you about the peanut butter that I stuffed these bad boys with. Fix and Fogg is a small New Zealand company who makes kickass peanut butter. They are based in Wellington, the city that I went to university in (and the city we are hoping to live in when we eventually move home), and operate out of a tiny little facility down a side alley in downtown Wellington, where they create the most incredible nut butters. I used to stock up every time that I was home, but I am SO, so excited that we can finally get them here in the states too! Their crunchy peanut butter is a toast time staple around here, but they also make all kinds of incredible flavoured nut butters - there’s a coffee maple, a fruit toast, a honey one, one called ‘smoke and fire’ which is spicy and smoky, and one of my favourites - their dark chocolate peanut butter. The dark chocolate PB is made with 62% dark chocolate, and it works so well in everything, including as the stuffing for these Chocolate Chip Cookies.

I took my regular cookie recipe and tweaked it a little - upping the muscovado sugar content for some more caramel notes, and then increasing the flour and leavening and decreasing the butter content just a touch to give a more sturdy cookie that would hold its shape wrapped around a disc of dark chocolate peanut butter. I then went full nerd on the process, testing chill times and baking temperatures to work out what worked best in terms of texture and keeping the peanut butter intact. Surprisingly, chill times didn’t make a difference, but the bake temperature made a significant difference in how much the peanut butter spread. Upping the bake temperature to 375°f (190°c) instead of the usual 350°f (190°c) meant that the cookie baked a little quicker, minimising the spread of the filling in the centre. So here we have it - giant peanut butter filled cookies, which require zero chill time. Everyone wins.

A few wee tips:

• I used a bar of chocolate for these cookies - I love how the uneven edges give texture within the cookie. Chopped wafers will work too.
• I worked out a new to me way of adding additional chocolate onto the top (which is an optional step but gives you epic chocolate puddles). You flatten one ball of dough, press the chocolate onto the top side, then continue as usual and roll it into a ball, which then gives you even chocolate distribution as the cookie bakes. This is optional - I like to chop up a little extra chocolate and keep it in a bowl next to me to do this step while I am assembling. I am a sucker for a good chocolate puddle.
• I found that the best way to get the peanut butter inside the cookie was to plop it out onto a pan lined with baking paper, then freeze until solid, then sandwich between two pieces of cookie dough, forming a seal around the outside, and then shaping into a ball.
• A cookie scoop is the best way to evenly portion your dough. I have a bunch but the one I reach for the most is this 2 Tbsp one. They are cheap but make your life so much easier when it comes to getting consistently sized cookies.
• You won’t use all of the peanut butter I have called for here - you want to make 12 or 13 2 tsp sized blobs of it, which you will use to stuff the cookies. I transferred the peanut butter to a bowl first and gave it a good mix to ensure it was even in consistency.
• Store the peanut butter blobs in the freezer while you aren’t using them - I like to get the first batch on to bake and then assemble the next batch just as they are almost finished baking, then use the first baking sheet to bake off the final batch. I did this in three batches, each with four cookies per baking sheet. They are big and do spread a little - you could get away with five per sheet, just make sure that they are well spaced.
• Sometimes your cookies bake up to be not so perfectly round. While I am all about embracing cookies as they naturally are, I do like them to be perfectly round, and a little trick for this is to take a cookie cutter slightly bigger than the cookie, place it over the top and use the cutter to scoot the cookie into a round shape. It’s definitely an optional step but works extremely well!

Thank you so much to Taste of New Zealand of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise for Sponsoring this post! All opinions are my own.

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