Chocolate and peanut butter – It just works

Chocolate cookies with peanut butter

 
Hershey really knew what he was doing when he created the Reese’s cup back in 1928 (Thanks Wikipedia!)
 
You really can’t go wrong with combining peanut butter and chocolate. Well, I guess you kind of can if you’re the type of person who hates chocolate (shame on you!) or you have a fatal peanut allergy….
 
But outside of that, chocolate and peanut butter just work. This weird brownie cookie, peanut butter stuffed creation was no exception to the rule either.
 

A ball of cookie dough, stuffed with peanut butter
 
Unfortunately, I don’t have a recipe for these, though.
 

Chocolate cookie dough with peanut butter filling buckeyes (This one looks like a buckeye!)

They were inspired by some long-forgotten chocolate cookie I found online, but during a heated moment of peanut butter craving, I tried stuffing them with a peanut butter and powdered sugar filling.

Cookie dough too dry
 
I quickly realized that trying to create a pocket in the somewhat-dry cookie dough and then filling it with peanut butter was rather tedious….not to mention kind of messy and ugly.
 
Use a muffin tin to fill cookies
 
And because I wanted cookies *now*, I moved to creating a base and “top” out of cookie dough and dropping dollops of peanut butter in the middle instead.
 
Cookies made in a muffin tin with peanut butter filling
 
The result wasn’t really any prettier, but it did seem a lot faster and easier.
 
Put the top layer of chocolate on filled cookies in a muffin tin Cooked muffin tin cookies
 
And the result was tasty regardless. They look drier in the pictures than they really were. The oil from the peanut butter soaked into the surrounding chocolatey goodness, leaving an almost brownie-like coating around the peanut butter center, but with crunchy edges.
 
Reese's peanut butter filled chocolate cookie brownies recipe
 
They were the perfect blend of brownie/cookie with ooey gooey peanut butter in the middle. If you’re the type who likes the chewy edges on brownies, but a soft middle, these are wondermous. It’s a shame I didn’t record the ingredients I used at the time, but oh well.

The evolution of candy bar wrappers

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Facts about Food Friday

Hershey’s bar wrappers have remained pretty consistent over the last century really, but some of the other candy bars in this Candy Bar Wrapper Archive have changed a bit more over time.

If you go take a look at Snickers, for example, they had a complete makeover somewhere between the 1959s and the 1980s….and then beyond that, they’ve changed colors some, but the main name font and styling has been pretty much the same. That’s most likely because candy bars are often bought at the checkout and we reach for what we know….it’d be marketing suicide to re-brand a well-known candy bar wrapper.

Some of the candy bars in the archive I didn’t recognize either. Like “Chicken Dinner” from the mid 1900s that was apparently really popular with the kids and was a reference to Hoover’s promise of  “a chicken in every pot” during the Great Depression. Who knew that kids would get excited by the idea of it. It had nothing to do with chicken, though, and was simply a chocolate covered nut roll.

Cheerios + Circus Peanuts = Lucky Charms? (Fun Facts about Food Friday)

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Yep, that’s right.

Lucky Charms are actually the result of a challenge given to product developers back in 1962 to come up with a creative twist on one of their main cereals (either Cheerios or Wheaties). John Holahan came up with the idea of mixing circus peanuts with Cheerios. General Mills’ advertising company suggested marketing it around the idea of charm bracelets and voila, Lucky Charms were born!

Another fun fact is that the “cheerio” portion was not originally sugar coated, but it didn’t sell very well, so they tossed in more sugar and people suddenly loved it. It stayed the exact same way until 2005 when they released chocolate flavored ones and then later on, marshmallow treats.