Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Shortbread Cookies

With that many delicious-sounding words in the title, it would have to be a good cookie, right?  I mean, we like all the things mentioned in the title, so it stands to reason that Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Shortbread Cookies are going to be something extraordinary. The photo on Pinterest looks like this:

Ingredients:

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.

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I had made shortbread cookies some time ago, and they turned out really great. This was a bit of a different process with the peanut butter addition, but the premise appeared to be the same.

First I creamed the butter with the peanut butter before adding the vanilla.

And then I added the dry ingredients. It seemed strange to mix the powdered sugar in with the flour instead of adding it first to the butter mixture, but the recipe didn’t call for separation.

Finally, I stirred in the chocolate chips.

The dough was a bit more smooth than that of regular shortbread. It had a velvety texture and was easily formed into a roll that was then wrapped in wax paper and refrigerated.

After a few hours, the roll was ready to be cut into cookie slices and baked. I used a dough scraper to cut the roll into 3/4″ pieces.

The slices were somewhat fragile, but they were easily molded into circular shapes.

Then they baked for 14 minutes and came out looking almost the same as when they went in.

They looked beautiful, but sadly, didn’t taste that great. First of all, the texture is really chalky; it sticks to the roof of the mouth and then refuses to dissolve in a timely fashion. I wonder if switching to granulated sugar and/or mixing that with the butter instead of the flour would make a difference, but I am not sure that I will try these again to find out. Overall, they didn’t have much flavor. Again, I point to the true test: the kids wouldn’t touch them beyond that first bite. So, while this cookie may seem like a good idea in theory, in practice, it wasn’t exactly what we were hoping for.