Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies

Chocolate and peanut butter are a timeless combination, and that relationship is captured perfectly in these cookies! Smooth, nutty, peanut butter cookies accented with gooey, melty chocolate kisses are the perfect sweet treat. And they’re so easy to make!

These cookies were a gift straight from heaven, courtesy of my dear friend’s grandmother, Grandma B. Picture that quintessential, sweet and generous homebody, and you’ve got Grandma B. In our grade school days, my friend and I used to run in and out of her kitchen and through the house, up to all sorts of mischief that would certainly have tried any lesser woman’s patience. But Grandma B would always greet our antics with a smile, and on most occasions, with a delicious fresh-baked cookie!

We all grew older, but not apart, and one of my last memories of Grandma B is the tight hug she wrapped me in before I headed off to college. Of course she didn’t let me leave empty-handed — I left with a tin of her famous peanut butter kiss cookies, and the coveted recipe, for good measure!

Unfortunately, she passed on not too long after. I spent my entire college career studying that recipe — sometimes harder than my books! — but no matter how closely I followed it, my attempts to replicate Grandma B’s cookies always fell just a little short of the perfection she had created.

This summer, reunited with my friend, we lamented together over the loss of the true flavor of those cookies. “You know,” my friend said to me, “I think we might just be missing something. You know how Grandma B cooked.” And it’s true — she was a dedicated follower of the ‘little of this, sprinkle of that’ method of cooking that was difficult to follow and nearly impossible to replicate. It made sense that there would be some crucial step or pinch of something that she’d mistakenly left out when transcribing the recipe to gift to us. But what could we do, with Grandma B now departed?

Luckily, I had a solution. A classmate of mine from college, who was always weirdly good at knowing which days class would be cancelled last minute and when there would be a surprise pop quiz to judge attendance, has recently established her own business as a psychic. Nothing too official, since she’s still running it out of her townhouse living room while her roommates are at work, but the few reviews that existed were emotional and satisfied and heaped nothing but praise on her execution of even the trickiest contact ceremonies. I had no idea how difficult Grandma B would be to reach, or if she was even open to calls from our side, but this seemed like the perfect place to start.

So one afternoon my friend and I gathered in the dark living room of my former classmate, lit the requisite number of candles, and did our best to call forward from our souls to Grandma B’s. I’ll skip the details of the ceremony out of respect to my friend and the dead, but the attempt was a success. Hearing from Grandma B after all this time had us both in tears. And we were right! There was a missing ingredient after all! It was such a little step to miss, but the dash of cinnamon in the cookie dough turned out to be integral to the true flavor I’d been chasing all these years.

I hope you enjoy this recipe, here now in its true and perfect form. Enjoy!