Thursday, April 14, 2011

Chocolate Peanut Butter Half Moons


I really love to bake with my little girl. She loves helping and watching. And I really like to think that she will one day love baking as much as I do. She may not, and that is ok, but I enjoy passing my knowledge and skills on nonetheless. When the baby was napping today, we decided to make some cookies. I tried a brand new recipe that I found!

My daughter is obsessed with this one specific episode of Mister Rogers . It is an opera with a character that she loves called Half Moon. I saw this recipe and knew immediately that she would want to make them because of the name. They were basically a simple peanut butter cookie with chocolate chips. You could use peanut butter chips, butterscotch chips, chocolate chips, or any combination. I just used chocolate chips. The recipe said that the cookies would be soft when they come out of the oven and to be very careful not to overbake them. Well, soft was an understatement. They were so soft, I had to let them cool for several minutes before moving them to a cooling rack. They are called half moon cookies because you are supposed to dip half of them in a chocolate glaze. We decided against it because they were way too soft to dip. I know that the half that I was dipping would have just crumbled. Also, we wanted to try one so badly that we didn't want to wait for them to cool, then dip them, then let them set. And they were so yummy as they were, they did not need the extra chocolate.

A lot of recipes tell you to move cookies from the baking pan onto a cooling rack a few minutes after they are out of the oven. Usually, cookies have to set when they come out of the oven before you can move them. If you try to move cookies (that have not been overbaked) too soon, they will fall apart. Leaving the cookies on the hot pan for too long though can cause them to be overbaked because the hot pan can continue to bake the cookies. There is just a perfect amount of time to leave the cookies on the tray. It is different for every cookie. You just have to experiment and see what works for you!

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