Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

There's National Kale Day, Take Your Teddy Bear to Work Day, National Balogna Day, and a multitude of other completely pointless holidays, but do we have a national holiday celebrating the person who first figured out to put chocolate and peanut butter together?

We might. The list of holidays is too long for me to stay awake while reading the whole thing, but still. It should be a day. It should be a week. Actually, it should be a BIG! HUGE! WEEK-LONG CELEBRATION! WITH FIREWORKS!

I kinda like peanut butter and chocolate together, guys.

Obviously, thinking about peanut butter and chocolate together very quickly leads to things happening in the kitchen. Like cookies.

This is Mindy's recipe. That woman knows how to rock the cookie thing, so there's not sense in going past her site and looking for anything else. It's not even worth trying to tweak her recipes because perfection. She bakes perfection.

Exceeeeeept. A certain Big Kid may have inhaled a bunch of my chocolate and peanut butter chips before they could turn into cookies. Thus, I subbed in Peanut Butter M&Ms. Desperate times lead to genius.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/4 granulated sugar
1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup creamy peanut butter
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups milk chocolate chocolate chips
1 cup Peanut Butter M&Ms

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

2. Line a couple of cookie sheet with parchment paper.

3. Toss the granulated sugar in a bowl. You're going to roll your little happy cookie balls in it before you bake them. Set it aside until you're ready to roll.

4. Medium mixing bowl. Butter, brown sugar, peanut butter, eggs, and vanilla. Make them do a little dance together.

5. In a separate medium mixing bowl, throw together your flour, baking soda, and salt. More dancing.

6. Now put the dance partners from each of your bowls in one bowl and mix them all together. Fold in the chocolate chips and Peanut Butter M&Ms.

7. Take a heaping teaspoon of dough and roll it into a ball. Now roll it in the granulated sugar. Place your happy little sugar-coated ball on your cookie sheet then repeat until your cookie sheet is full. You will want the cookie balls to be at least two inches apart because these cookies do spread.

8. Let's help guide that spreading, shall we? Use the palm of your hand to press each cookie flat. Each one should be about 1/3 inch thick.

9. Bake at 375 degrees for 8-9 minutes. Here's the only tricky thing -- that time will vary depending on how big you make the cookies. I used 1" happy little balls and 8 minutes was perfect. If you go bigger than 1", bake them longer. Start keeping an eye on them around the 7-minute mark just to be safe.

10. Count the number of times you smirked when I wrote "balls." If you scored more than five, welcome to my club. We're super grown-up and stuff here.