The thing that mattered almost as much to me as the presents I received on Christmas day was the massive amount of cookie baking that I did with my mother, brother, and sister during the few days prior to Christmas. My mother is a middle school teacher, so we were only allotted the 3 or 4 days before December 25th- depending on when school let out for winter break- to get “down and dirty” in the kitchen.
We’d start early in the morning. Boxes of butter would have been set out the night before, in a place safe from my curious cat, to ensure it was soft. All the recipes were located on index cards in a wooden box essentially only used for this Christmas cooking making extravaganza. The usuals that I can recall were: Russian Tea Cakes, Spritz, peanut butter kisses, oatmeal raisin, meringues, chocolate chips, gingerbread cookies, snickerdoodles, and peanut brittle. We would make and bake an exorbitant amount of cookie batches because we would give plates of them to neighbors and friends.
The peanut butter kiss cookies are still my all time favorite. There are numerous ways to screw up the other cookie recipes; the gingerbread people are troublesome to remove from their mold, the meringues are not always fluffy, the cookie press may stop working when trying to make the Spritz shapes causing us to resort to fashion our own forms out of them. But the peanut butter kiss cookies always cooperate.
It certainly was a family affair getting the peanut butter kiss cookies made. My two siblings and I were each given a task of either rolling the peanut butter balls, dipping them in sugar, or unwrapping dozens of Hershey’s kisses. My ideal chore was unwrapping the chocolate because then I got the opportunity to arrange them how I wanted them to be on the holding plate. Sometimes I’d make pyramidal structures out of them, and at others it was simple concentric circles. When the dough was all rolled out, we would bake two cookie sheets at a time. But the vital part during the baking process was timing when to add the kisses. If one added them too soon, the cookies ended up undercooked because the kisses can only stand so long at 350° F before they haplessly melt. When the sheets were removed from the oven, it was a race against time to place the kisses in the center of the dough ball. We worked like well-trained factory workers transporting the kisses from the plate to the cookies. The cookie sheets were returned to the oven for a few minutes before taken out to cool.
When it came time to eating the peanut butter kiss cookies, I generally ended up removing the Hershey kiss and simply eating the cookie. I loved how the area underneath where the kiss had been plopped was compacted doughy-ness, more so than I enjoyed eating the chocolate kiss itself.
We’d start early in the morning. Boxes of butter would have been set out the night before, in a place safe from my curious cat, to ensure it was soft. All the recipes were located on index cards in a wooden box essentially only used for this Christmas cooking making extravaganza. The usuals that I can recall were: Russian Tea Cakes, Spritz, peanut butter kisses, oatmeal raisin, meringues, chocolate chips, gingerbread cookies, snickerdoodles, and peanut brittle. We would make and bake an exorbitant amount of cookie batches because we would give plates of them to neighbors and friends.
The peanut butter kiss cookies are still my all time favorite. There are numerous ways to screw up the other cookie recipes; the gingerbread people are troublesome to remove from their mold, the meringues are not always fluffy, the cookie press may stop working when trying to make the Spritz shapes causing us to resort to fashion our own forms out of them. But the peanut butter kiss cookies always cooperate.
It certainly was a family affair getting the peanut butter kiss cookies made. My two siblings and I were each given a task of either rolling the peanut butter balls, dipping them in sugar, or unwrapping dozens of Hershey’s kisses. My ideal chore was unwrapping the chocolate because then I got the opportunity to arrange them how I wanted them to be on the holding plate. Sometimes I’d make pyramidal structures out of them, and at others it was simple concentric circles. When the dough was all rolled out, we would bake two cookie sheets at a time. But the vital part during the baking process was timing when to add the kisses. If one added them too soon, the cookies ended up undercooked because the kisses can only stand so long at 350° F before they haplessly melt. When the sheets were removed from the oven, it was a race against time to place the kisses in the center of the dough ball. We worked like well-trained factory workers transporting the kisses from the plate to the cookies. The cookie sheets were returned to the oven for a few minutes before taken out to cool.
When it came time to eating the peanut butter kiss cookies, I generally ended up removing the Hershey kiss and simply eating the cookie. I loved how the area underneath where the kiss had been plopped was compacted doughy-ness, more so than I enjoyed eating the chocolate kiss itself.
Peanut Butter Kisses:1 cup butter
2/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup granular sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
2 2/3 cup flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
36 Hershey’s chocolate kisses
Combine butter, peanut butter, and sugars in electric mixer and blend until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla. After mixing flour, salt, and soda, add to cream mixture and stir well. Roll dough into quarter size balls. Roll each ball in a bowl of sugar. Bake dough at 350° F for 8 minutes. Take out and quickly place a chocolate kiss in the center of each cookie. Bake an additional 2 minutes.
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