Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

Classic peanut butter cookies are always good, but chocolate chips make them even better. Combining these two ingredients gives you that signature combination that’s always a hit when it comes to dessert.

They have just 10 ingredients. Depending if you bake regularly, these are all things you might have in your kitchen whether that’s in the pantry or the fridge.

Chilling the dough and letting it rest helps with timing and planning. While this is essential for baking thick cookies, you should take advantage of breaking up the recipe into two overall parts: making the dough one day and baking them the next.

You can use natural peanut butter or regular processed peanut butter like Skippy or Jif. We are a natural peanut butter household, so that’s what I typically use for homemade cookies. Natural will make the cookies turn out more crumbly than regular. 

The Ingredients

This is what you need:

• Butter: For baking, I most often use unsalted butter. Leave it out at room temperature to soften. You should be able to easily press your finger in it leaving dent, but it should still feel a bit cold to the touch. If you want to speed up softening butter, you can use the big holes of a box grater to cut the butter into small pieces. Never microwave it. Softened butter should not be melted.
• Peanut butter: As mentioned, you can use natural or regular peanut butter. Natural will give you a more crumbly texture. Regular peanut butter will make the cookies softer. Either will give you great peanut butter flavor.
• Chocolate chips: Even though semisweet chocolate chips are what you usually see for cookies, you can swap with bittersweet, dark chocolate chips or milk chocolate chips, which will have the most sweetness of the options. You can also use chocolate chunks instead of chips.
• Brown sugar: It is up to you if you want to use light brown sugar or dark brown sugar. Dark has a more intense molasses flavor than light. No matter the color, brown sugar also makes cookies chewy.
• Granulated sugar: You’ll notice that this recipe has more brown sugar than white sugar. That’s because granulated sugar makes cookies spread. Since we want them to turn out thick, the dough has 3/4 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup granulated sugar.
• Egg: The recipe calls for 1 large egg.
• Vanilla extract: These cookies taste very nutty, but pure vanilla extract is important because it enhances the butteriness of them.
• Flour: No surprise, this peanut butter cookie recipe requires all-purpose flour.
• Baking soda helps the cookies rise.
• Salt activates the flavors all the ingredients in the cookies. This is true for both savory cooking recipes and sweet baking recipes.

How To Make Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies

1. Cream the butter and both sugars. It’s best to do this with a handheld electric mixer in a large bowl or a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix them for 4 minutes until they are pale and fluffy.

2. Beat in the egg and vanilla extract.

3. Combine the flour, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl.

4. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. You can do this by hand with a wooden spoon or with the mixer on low speed.

5. Stir the chocolate chips into the dough.

6. Portion out the dough. A cookie scoop is the quickest way to do this, and it is easier to get cookies that are all about the same size. You can put them on a lined cookie sheet or plate and cover them. Then chill the cookie dough balls overnight in the fridge. 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.

7. Place the portioned dough 3 inches apart on a lined sheet pan . 

8. Bake the cookies until they are golden brown and cracked on top, about 20-22 minutes. I prefer baking one sheet pan at a time. Then all the cookies bake on the same oven rack. This is for consistency. Let the cookies cool on the pan for 5 minutes and then transfer them to a wire rack to cool.

Serving

These peanut butter chocolate chip cookies are tasty warm or at room temperature. They are great for sharing including potlucks or cookie exchanges assuming there are no nut allergies in the group.

Storage & Freezing

You can keep the cookies in an airtight container at room temperature for 2-3 days. Longer than that and they will start to dry out.

You can freeze baked or unbaked cookies. Thaw frozen baked cookies at room temperature. Before you freeze unbaked cookies, portion out the dough onto a pan lined with parchment or wax paper. Then put them in the freezer. Once they are frozen solid, you can put them in the same container. Baking frozen cookies may require an additional couple minutes baking time.