Love in the time of Kisses

I’ve been a bit busy lately and didn’t have the time to go all-out for Valentine’s Day (or, as we sometimes call it, Boo-al-en-tine’s Day).

But I wanted to make Mike a little something special. And I know how much he likes peanut butter. Peanut butter was actually pretty hard to find in Japan – there was something that was like peanut foam or peanut fluff (it had the right pictures on the container, but totally the wrong density/weight). Anyway, so Mike’s been a bit peanut-deprived. Add to that the fact that I rarely make peanut butter cookies because I am just not super-wild about nuts.

So, I decided to give from the heart – especially in the sense that I would be less interested in eating the dough – and make him some of those peanut butter Hershey kiss cookies. (Okay, no pun intended with that heart comment, really).

I thought that this would be a totally simple recipe to get. But, like all (or most?) simple things, the internets greatly complicated my search. It turns out that a) you can make these cookies using Bisquick mixed with peanut butter and sweetened condensed milk (gross!), and b) there’s a raging controversy about whether you put this Hershey kiss in mid-baking or during the cooling process. Who knew?

So I gave up and went to the source: my good friend Miso’s mother. Now that I think about it, her peanut butter kiss cookies were actually the first ones of the kind that I ever ate. In college (see, I wasn’t kidding about that whole not-eating-very-many-nuts thing).

Her recipe is actually pretty cool – it works off a cookie starter base, and then you add the peanut butter to that. You can scale the starter and additional peanut butter part up or down, depending on the quantity desired. And, for the record, you put the kiss in after baking as the cookies are cooling.

While my cookies were good (from the half of one I ate), I don’t think they were as good as Miso’s mother’s. Really, this could be due to a few reasons – 1) I made a math error in scaling down the recipe, 2) I used all butter, instead of a butter-Crisco mix, 3) I used the super-natural peanut butter that has only peanuts and salt as ingredients, and/or 4) I either over- or under-cooked them, because, really, how can you tell when a cookie that starts out as a golden brown is done? I felt like my cookies were too crumbly – they didn’t form easily into balls, and they tended to fall apart when I pushed the kiss into them. I solved that last problem by letting them cool a little more than suggested before putting the kiss in. And, this morning, the cookies are perfectly fine and don’t really seem all that crumblySo, anyway, that’s what I did last night. I would definitely recommend this gift/strategy to others for Valentine’s Day.