The best laid plans...

My blog-buddy, facebook friend and email penpal Hannah has recently been subjected to an icky time.  Travelling the world sounds pretty awesome, but she came back to Australia to be met with surgery and a terribly unpleasant housesitting gig.  So I decided to send some cookies, because that's kind of what I do.  (And how appropriate that I am posting about this today, on Hannah's birthday.)

I thought and thought about which cookies would be best to send.  Then I remembered Hannah's appreciation for peanut butter + chocolate, and thought Peanut Butter Cookies with Chocolate Chunks would be appropriate.  Then I had a flashback to my pregan undergraduate days, when the university catering services provided the most delicious peanut butter filled chocolate cookies at special events.  It was like a light bulb went off in my head -- that was what I was going to do!

I made two batches of dough, both following recipes from Vegan with a Vengeance.  For the peanut butter, I followed the "crunchy peanut butter cookies" recipe; for chocolate I made the dough for "jam thumbprints" -- minus the jam, of course.  I let my doughs rest in the fridge overnight, as I do with all cookie doughs, so the flour can properly absorb the fats and flavours.

When it came time to bake, I decided to be more creative than just one type of biscuit.  I had half-and-halfs; choc-filled peanut butter biscuits; peanut butter-filled choc biscuits; swirls; and other fun designs.

I baked them, pulled them out of the oven and let them cool on the pan for a few minutes.  Then I started transferring them to a cooling rack, and that is where the proverbial cookie crumbled.  The peanut butter was not crispy -- in fact, it sort of dissolved upon contact.  It was like loosely-bound flour with a peanut butter flavour.  FAIL.

I was very sad that my wonderful idea didn't work, but I managed to salvage enough cookies whose foundations were chocolate -- the firmer of the two biscuit components -- and sent a few off to Hannah.

Andy and I were forced (oh the horrors!) to eat the remaining biscuits.  They were tasty and a good idea, but in future I'm going to try different peanut butter cookie recipes and will hopefully not get such a failure.