jelly

Apparently, I blinked and July passed by in a flash and now it is August. How did that happen? Summer is almost over and there are back-to-school supplies everywhere. I am not a child under 18, nor do I have any children under 18, but somehow I still get caught up in the back-to-school “season”. I take full advantage and stock up on pens, highlighters, notebooks. (binders, pencil pouches…don’t judge.) It’s also a great time to get nostalgic about my favorite school lunch: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I love peanut butter and jelly. Love. There are very few foods I truly love (who am I kidding, there are lots), but this one is at the top of the list. Last year around this time I made peanut butter and jelly cupcakes, and oh my were they delicious! So when all those school supplies popped up in Target a few weeks ago, I got a hankering to make another pb&j treat, this time in the form of these peanut butter and jelly thumbprint cookies.

Like any good pb&j, it starts with the peanut butter. In this case, a peanut butter cookie. If you have a favorite recipe, you could probably sub that in, instead. But this recipe is perfect for making thumbprint cookies since they spread out just enough and are soft, not crumbly.

Start by mixing the butter, sugar, and peanut butter together until they are light and fluffy. Then mix in the egg and vanilla. Lastly, incorporate the flour, baking soda, and salt.

When I mix up cookie dough, I tend to do a lot of mixing up until the point I add the flour. Once the flour is added, you run the risk of developing a really tough cookie (something about the gluten in the flour). But before the flour is added, mix away to your heart’s content!

After a quick rest in the fridge, form the dough into small ping-pong ball or smaller sized balls (I like to use my handy dandy cookie dough scoop for that). Then roll them around in sugar. I used turbinado sugar, which is more coarse, but regular granulated sugar would work just fine.

Bake these cookies for about 15 minutes. Then as soon as you take the out of the oven use the back of a teaspoon to form the little indentation for the jam. You can also use the end of a wooden spoon, handle of a rolling pin, or your thumb. But I find the teaspoon works perfectly.

A good pb&j is only as good as the j. In my opinion, raspberry jelly is the only jam/jelly/preserve that should be in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Strawberry is too sweet, and grape is too artificial. Raspberry is the perfect amount of sweet and tart to balance out the creamy peanut butter. But you can pick whatever jam/jelly/preserve you like to spoon into the centers of these cookies (just know that if you pick anything other than raspberry, you chose poorly…just kidding…sort of…not really).

Can you tell I feel strongly about my jelly?

I am just passionate about my pb&j. And equally as passionate about these cookies, because they combine two of my favorite things: peanut butter and jelly and cookies!

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Quick question: If you could only eat one food/meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Without hesitation I can tell you that mine would be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Specifically creamy peanut butter and raspberry jelly on white bread (although I will accept wheat bread) and maybe a few potato chips thrown in there for some crunch. If you haven’t tried potato chips in your pb&j, you should rectify that immediately. It’s amazing.

As you can see my love of peanut butter and jelly runs deep. So when I was trying to think of something fun (and different) to bake for a work bake sale, I immediately thought of making peanut butter and jelly cupcakes.

For the cupcakes, I started with a vanilla boxed cake mix and added some peanut butter powder so that the cupcakes had a little bit of a hint of peanut butter.

Then for the jelly in this peanut butter and jelly, I piped some raspberry jelly into the center of the cupcake. I just used a sharp star pipping tip to punch through the top of the cupcake (but they also make piping tips just for this occasion). I will say, it was a little hard to tell how much jelly was getting piped in, so I watched the level of the jelly in the bag to make sure there was a healthy jelly filling.

The last step, and the literal icing on the cake, is the peanut butter frosting. This stuff is amazing and basically tasted like the center of a peanut butter cup. How could that be bad, especially when it’s combined with a delicious jelly filled cupcake?

So when I originally made these cupcake for the bake sale I didn’t actually eat them. I was doing the Whole 30 then so I made my husband taste test everything and make sure they were okay. I took them into work not really knowing if they were any good. The feedback was immediate. Within a couple hours I had multiple emails requesting the recipe. Clearly they were a hit so I knew I had to make them again once I was off the Whole 30.

Even though each individual piece of these cupcakes is nothing special (except for that icing – I could eat it slathered on some cardboard), the whole cupcake together literally tastes like childhood. If I close my eyes I can picture 9 year old Lindsey eating a pb&j at the lunch tables at school.

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Peanut Butter and Jelly Thumbprint Cookies

Peanut Butter and Jelly Cupcakes