Let's All Make Cookies

While Toronto may not be internationally known for its baked goods, this city is nonetheless full of delicious foods from all over the globe. That includes in our very own kitchens, as today we’re going to bake. I’m going to take you through a recipe for tasty cookies and include detailed instructions for rookie bakers. And if you already know how to bake, then you get to space out and/or examine this post for spelling errors. Yay!

Tip#1: Don’t be afraid, you can do it. Some people see a homemade muffin and are impressed. Don’t be impressed. All it takes is reading instructions, following them, and then taking the stuff out of the oven before it burns. Fair enough, many people have difficulty following directions. If you don’t bake much, you really should follow the recipe exactly, and then when you are more experienced, you can experiment. Because really, baking is science. And you can’t always guesstimate science.

Today’s delicious confection is a Peanut Butter Kiss Cookie. The recipe comes from the website Joyofbaking.com which has many great recipes for delicious cakes and cookies and pies and more. I get a lot of recipes online, and sometimes things don’t work, but this website is pretty good. This cookie is a chewy peanut butter cookie with a whole hershey’s kiss stuck in the centre, unwrapped.

The Ingredients:
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
3/4 cup peanut butter (I went for smooth)
1/3 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 cups all purpose/whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup white sugar for coating
48 chocolate kisses, unwrapped

First thing you have to do is take your butter out of the fridge and sit it on the counter to soften. You need it to be room temperature so you can cream it with the sugar. If it is too hard, the butter is lumpy and hard to work with, and creaming doesn’t work if your butter is melted. Take out your egg while you’re at it, because you are supposed to bake with room temperature eggs, though I don’t know why and I have successfully used cold eggs. But do it anyway, cuz you’re there already.

Tip #2: When making cookies, remember that creaming the butter and the sugar is a crucial step, don’t skip it. Don’t just dump everything together, you’ll end up with gross dense cookies.

When your butter is sufficiently room temperature (when you can stick a knife through it easily) bust out your electric mixer. You can use a stand mixer if you are so lucky, or a hand mixer will work. If you have neither you can use a wooden spoon and some arm muscle. Put the butter in a big bowl and beat until it is smooth and a little fluffy. Then add your sugars and peanut butter. Try to measure everything out properly, no eyeballing. If you coat the measuring cup with a bit of oil, the peanut butter comes out easier. Continue to beat until it all creates a fluffy homogeneous mass. Then dump in the egg and vanilla and keep beating. When that is all combined, add the milk and beat until it’s combined too.

Now, get out a medium sized bowl and measure out your dry ingredients. Here’s where you should try to be exact with your measurements. Dump your flour (I like to use whole wheat flour because it’s better for you and the little whole wheat flakes are fun to eat), baking soda (not baking powder, they are different. Baking powder is a rising agent, and cookies don’t need to rise), and salt (don’t be alarmed, there’s not enough to make your cookies taste salty) into the bowl and stir them together. Combining the dry separately ensures that the baking soda and salt are evenly distributed within the dough, and you don’t get blobs of salt in one cookie or something.

Add the flour into the butter mixture and beat it all together. This can get messy as flour tends to fly when it is beaten at high speeds. You can stir by hand first to coat the flour with butter, and then finish with the beater. You don’t want to overmix when baking, so just beat until everything is combined together. You also don’t want to undermix, so make sure the dough looks the same everywhere, with no obvious lumps of flour in places.

And there you go! You made cookie dough! Or I guess I made cookie dough, but if you followed along, then you made cookie dough. Feel free to eat some, but don’t eat it all because then you won’t have any cookies and you’ll feel guilty. Now cover the dough with cling wrap and put it in the fridge for an hour so that it’s hard enough to roll into balls.

While you wait you can get to work unwrapping a bunch of hershey’s kisses. The recipe says it makes 48, but you don’t have to bake them all at once, and the yield depends on the size of your cookies. I wouldn’t recommend unwrapping 48, because if you don’t use them all you end up with a bunch of naked kisses and then you have to eat them all, and no one wants to eat 20 kisses in one sitting.

Ok, so when the hour is up, pull the dough out and switch your oven on to 375ºF. Line your baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking sheet for easier clean up.


If you have round measuring spoons, a tablespoon is probably a good size for measuring out the dough. Or you can use a melon baller (does anyone have those anymore? Or are they an artifact of days gone by when ladies served pineapple rounds surrounding maraschino cherries toothpicked to ham? I think my mom has a melon baller), or just a spoon. Put some sugar on a plate for rolling. Scoop out some dough and roll it into a ball between your hands. The ball should be about 1” in size. Roll it around in the sugar until it’s evenly coated and place it on the cookie sheet. These cookies don’t spread out much, so you don’t need to leave them too much room, but give them a little space so they don’t stick together. Keep doing this until you have filled the tray. Roughly 9-12 should fit comfortably on a standard tray. Pop them in the oven and set the timer for 8 min. After 8 min, check them to see if they have turned golden. If not, keep them in for up to 10 min.



When they are golden and set, take them out the oven. They will be soft and a little crackly on top. Carefully stick a hershey’s kiss in the centre of each cookie right away. Press it in until the cookie cracks a little and the kiss looks firmly planted in. The heat of the cookies will soften the kisses while they are hot, but they will cool back up and be solid chocolates.

Then you eat the cookies!

Let them cool, and then you can store them in a Tupperware or put them in plastic containers and give them away to friends and acquaintances. You can also put leftover dough in the fridge or freezer. You should probably use refrigerated dough within the week, frozen dough can last a couple months.

Tip #3: Don’t eat too many at once, it’s not good for you.

Ok now go bake.

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