12.12.07
Ready, Set…
Last night rather unexpectedly marked the beginning of the Christmas cookie train for me this year. It all started innocently enough: Freyja was being a pill, so I made her up a peanut butter Kong (natural peanut butter mixed with some of her kibble and packed inside one of her Kongs). She spent a few hours trying to suck every bit of peanutty goodness out of the Kong while we watched our new copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on HD-DVD. The unintended side effect of doggie distraction was that the entire room smelled like peanut butter, and all of a sudden I found myself craving peanut butter cookies.
Foodie bride to the rescue! I remembered having just seen a perfect-looking peanut butter cookie recipe on Shawnda’s blog, so I whipped up a batch, and they really hit the spot. My very minor adjustments: I replaced half of the AP flour with white whole wheat, used natural peanut butter because it was already out, doled out smallish rounds of dough with my cookie scoop onto a preheated baking stone and pressed 3 milk chocolate chips in the top of each cookie. They were perfectly baked at 11 minutes, golden brown on the edges and still soft in the middle.
I was planning to start my official holiday cookie-baking marathon this weekend, and I don’t want to let this impromptu baking session throw me off. The bigger concern is the doctor’s appointment I had this morning: I took the glucose test for gestational diabetes, a standard test at this point in my pregnancy. Yes, I see the irony of making a fresh batch of peanut butter cookies the night before taking my glucose test. The bad part is that if I do end up having gestational diabetes, I’ll find out just in time to disrupt all of my Christmas dessert plans. Wish me luck!
Update 4/14/08: My first shot at baking since Nolan arrived was another batch of these cookies. They came out great, and I got most of them baked off before it was time to go pump again. Added semi-sweet chocolate chips to the dough upon request, and didn’t bother chilling the dough before baking—on my hot baking stone, they stayed nice and puffy. I baked 10 minutes, and tapped them down with the spatula before cooling slightly and removing to a rack.