Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

Name: Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup Cookies
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 30 min
Ingredients: ¾ cup unsalted butter (softened); ¾ cup brown sugar; ¾ cup granulated sugar; ¾ cup peanut butter; 2 large eggs; 2 tsp vanilla extract; 2 cups all-purpose flour; ¼ tsp salt; 1¼ tsp baking soda; ¼ cup granulated sugar (for rolling cookies); 2 cups peanut butter cups (any size, coarsely chopped)

ByDavid August 26, 2016April 12, 2021

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It’s hard to beat the chocolate + peanut butter combo! These Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup Cookies are a favorite around here!

Can we talk about college classes for a minute? Most of my classes met either 2 or 3 times a week. The 2/week classes would meet for ~75 minutes (if I remember correctly), and I used to think that was the worst! How am I going to make it through an hour and 15 minutes!?! That’s where the crossword puzzle in the student newspaper came in handy! Hah. In hindsight, that’s nothing. I now spend at least 30 minutes in the evening just feeding Robbie dinner.

And those 3/week classes? 50 minutes. That’s hardly enough time to even get a class started! When I was teaching Latin, we got ~45/50 minutes per class, and I remember really having to be on my game in order to get through my lesson plan each day. I can’t imagine trying to teach a college course in just 45 minute blocks of time.

Fast forward to grad school, and courses always met for 3 hours once a week. 3 hours is a long haul, but I was ok with it since I commuted ~1.5 hours each way to campus. I’d usually try to time my courses so that I could knock out at least 2 on one trip.

And honestly, the 3-hour courses weren’t that bad because the topics were so much more interesting. Well, except for that advanced stats class. That one was not interesting. But the History of Higher Education in America? Oh man, I loved that course! Tons (as in hundreds of pages a week) of reading, but it was well worth it.

The nice thing about the 3 hour courses is our professors would often give us a break somewhere in between. That’s when one my buddies and I would make a mad dash to one of the coffee shops in downtown Athens. We’d grab a large coffee and head back to class ready to go again. But then I discovered the cookies. This coffee shop had the most amazing cookies! And by amazing cookies, I mean biggest cookies ever. Easily as big as my hand…if not my face.

If I was feeling particularly good about my workout from that morning, then I’d wander over to the case with the Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup Cookies. These were huge peanut butter cookies embedded with chunks of peanut butter cup…like an entire peanut butter cup. Nothing got you ready for the 2nd half of a long class like a chocolate peanut butter cup cookie…of course, sometimes they put me into a sugar coma. But that’s what the coffee was for!

I was reminiscing about those grad school classes the other day, so I decided to relive them…through cookies of course! I mean, I could have pulled out some journal articles and read those for fun. But nah, eating cookies is way more fun than reading journal articles, right? I used my go-to peanut butter cookie recipe and then pressed some chopped peanut butter cups into the top of each cookie before baking. The result? Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup Cookies…also known as cookie perfection. Enjoy!