Recipe of the Day: Pillow Cookies

I have been wanting to try this recipe for a while now. It all started when my friend introduced me to the website www.bakerella.com. I was flipping through the site with my mouth gaping open, as I salivated and stared, eyes glazed over, at these decadent objects referred to as pillow cookies. This great invention consists of baking a batch of brownies, mixing up some cookie dough (Bakerella uses chocolate chip), creating monstrous sized balls with the dough, stuffing them with the baked brownie, and THEN baking the cookie. I couldn't resist.

SO, I started thinking, what would be even better than brownie stuffed chocolate chip cookies? WHY YES!!! Brownie stuffed PEANUT BUTTER cookies. It would be like an inside out Reese's Peanut Butter cup times ten.

Last night I decided to take on this endeavor to create my own pillow cookies. Now don’t get too excited, I did not make these from scratch. I bought one box of Ghirardelli dark chocolate chunk brownie mix (yeah, that’s right) and 2 pouches of Betty Crocker Peanut Butter cookie mix.

I mixed up the brownies and popped them in the oven. I made sure to bake them about 5-10 minutes less than the time on the box so they would be a little fudgey. While they were baking I licked the brownie bowl…I mean, I mixed up the 2 bags of peanut butter cookie mix, did a couple taste tests and placed the dough in the refrigerator (the dough is suppose to refrigerate for 45 minutes to an hour.)

Once the brownies were done, I pulled them out to let them cool and then turned the oven down to 325 degrees. Then the fun began. I ate a couple brownies, I had to do a taste test again, I didn’t want to kill anyone. Then I pulled the peanut butter cookie dough out of the refrigerator and formed about 10 extremely UGE (no H) balls.

I pushed my thumb down in each of them to make a hole to place the brownie in.

I cut the brownies into 1 x 1 in. chunks and stuffed them in each ball of dough, then folded the dough over the top to cradle the brownie bites. Oh my god, I wanted to eat them just like that, it was so tempting.

AND THEN…popped them in the oven for about 13 minutes or so. Just be careful because I screwed up the first batch. I don’t know if it was the pan or what, but the bottoms turned black. I was so upset that I cut the tops off so I could still eat them.

WHOOPS!

For the other batches (I could only fit about 4 or 5 cookies on one pan), I cooked them for half of the time on the middle rack and then moved them to the top rack for the rest of the time. But, you have to consider that our oven is freakin’ 100 years old, so I am sure it will be better if you have a newer model.

 Look how big these things are

Voila! Obscenely delicious brownie stuffed peanut butter pillow cookies. I was sick by the end of the night from all of the taste testing.