I made this dessert as soon as I got up this morning. I woke up in a wonderful mood and felt the need to jump into the kitchen! I am so happy that I did because making these was very fun. I am also happy to report that I am fully caught up on my back tracking of recipes, every dessert that I have made has a blog post up. In other baking news, everyone adored the chocolate covered pretzels from yesterday! They went very quickly, absolutely none left. Having people enjoy my desserts is one of the best feelings I’ve ever had, this is truly making me happy. I get to wake up and know there will always be something that will be calming and fun during my day.
Today was No-bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Cookies. I get most of my recipes from Tumblr blogs I follow – I had apparently not emailed this recipe to myself when I found it this morning and just ended up having to search through my Tumblr feed for abour ten minutes to find it again. The time it took to find it gave me a little bit of anxiety due to doubting I would find it again. That thought is silly though since it would be weird for someone to take down their post, especially a dessert post! The search was worth it though, not posting a link to this wonderful recipe would have been 1. wrong on my end and 2. unfortunate for you guys because it’s obvious that everyone needs these cookies in their life. It also helps to have the recipe in front of me when explaining what the hell it is that I did in my kitchen.
To start this dessert off you melt 1/2 a cup of unsalted butter in a pan/pot. This step seemed to take forever for me, I was so excited to try and make these cute little yummblies (yes, that is a word – I swear). The next step is to add in 1/2 a cup of milk. I use 1% milk in all of the recipes that call for milk. I don’t know if that makes a difference and I am too afraid that it does to Google the answer, I am perfectly fine with pretending to know what I am doing when substituting ingredients. While I was adding in the milk the butter looked strangely streaky, I most likely could have let it melt a little. Again, impatient.
After adding the milk it’s time to add in the sugar. ALL THE SUGAR! 2 cups of sugar looked like a mountain of diabetes. Since I am not a person who will be partaking in these cookies, I am okay with serving 9 pounds of 
heart failure. It didn’t dawn on me to stir the sugar into the butter, so I went directly to the next step of adding 1/4 of a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder. This made it look like an actual mountain – which I laughed to myself about. Alone. In my empty kitchen. It’s fine guys, I am totally sane. Once you’ve finished mixing these ingredients together it’s time to take the saucepan off the burner add in the part that smells the best! Adding in 1/2 a cup of peanut butter and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. You stir this mixture until it is smooth, you’re not going to want to stop stirring it though. Every circular motion that spatula makes a gust of peanut butter aroma fills your nose.
Next is to add in 2 1/2 cups of old fashioned oatmeal. I graciously added in 1/2 a cup and stirred it a tiny amount to take a picture – then I made another colossal mass in the pan and added in the 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Side tracking here, why the hell do we always add salt to desserts? I do not honestly care enough to Google the answer or ask my mother, both would come out with a new insight to my baking brain. I guess it doesn’t seem all that odd to me but only because it’s in almost every recipe, nothing new to the baking process for me, just curious.
Back on track – It is finally time to add in those pretzels, 1 cup of chopped pretzels. I did not know what size ‘chopped’ pretzels should be, I was using the same jumbo sourdough pretzels that I used in the chocolate covered pretzel recipe. I ended up breaking them with my fingers and figuring it was fine. Once you’ve added in all of these ingredients it’s time to mix them all together! I thought this might be a little difficult because of how full the pan was, but I surprisingly did not make any mess on the stove. It looked really great too!
When you have succesfully mixed everything together you spoon some out onto wax paper into whatever you think cookies should look like. I am adding in a picture of these sitting in my refrigerator because you can see that I have the pan sitting on the little door shelf thing. My cookie sheet is being used for something else at the moment and I was nervous about transfering them from my kitchen table to the shelf to cool without dropping them on the floor. So, I placed a sheet of wax paper down on the shelf and spooned the cookie mix onto the paper there. It worked out! Note: That is an eggplant in the drawer. And my refrigerator is seriously that empty, sorry guys, this is kind of a pathetic photo now that I am looking at it.
I let these cool for about a half hour until I took a few out for the end result picture. They seemed to be nice and chewy feeling, not too chewy and falling apart, the perfect softness with the pretzel crunch that comes with these little cookies. I am not sure if I made these cookies too small since the recipe says it makes 2 dozen, I ended up with 32. That doesn’t seem to be something to complain about though because it just means there are more for everyone to enjoy. I don’t have any changes that I would make with the process that these came with. I love how straight forward the cookie instructions are, whoever wrote out the directions apparently knew I needed very well written and explained instructions! I will definitely be making these again, maybe even one of the desserts I’ll make for Christmas! You guys decide though – success? If you say no, you’re wrong.
As Baked by Ginger 