Valentine surprise cookies

Real life has been a little rough lately.  Baking is a nice diversion, especially when it's with Ben.  So even though it's a little bit early for Valentine's Day baking we decided to give these cookies a test run.

I found this whoopie pie pan a while ago.  Initially I resisted it; I'm not much of a fan of the whole whoopie pie movement.  Maybe I just need to find the right recipe, but so far I haven' t been too impressed with the whoopies I've tried.  Anyway.  At some point I decided to get the pan because it would make awesome, thick cookies. 

Ben and I decided on peanut butter cookies and used my go-to recipe:

Peanut Butter Cookies

• 1/2 cup salted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1 1/4 cups flour

Mix the peanut butter, sugars, vanilla and butter until smooth, then add the egg.

Gradually mix in the dry ingredients.

Bake in a 375 degree preheated oven.  If you are making regular cookies, bake for about 9 minutes.  If you are making these in the whoopie pie pan, bake them a bit longer--I started checking them at 12 minutes but each batch probably baked more like 14 minutes.

Since this pan makes huge cookies, I decided there was room to add a chocolate center to each one--Ben said the chocolate would be a Valentine surprise, so we went with it, referring to them from that point forward as Valentine Surprise Cookies.

Put a scoop of the dough in each heart cavity, then flattened that down and added a chocolate piece.  (Next time, I will add two pieces of chocolate.  I was afraid there wouldn't really be enough room for that and the chocolate would be seeping out the top or sides of the cookies, but that wasn't the case!)

Add another scoop of dough on top and flatten that out to cover the chocolate. 

 

We decided to drizzle chocolate over the top of ours and have a little bit of ice cream with them--they were pretty awesome.

We loved them so much we did another batch with chocolate chip cookie dough...

We'll keep using this pan to make cookies like this--they were really good and stayed soft.  I froze a bunch of them and they were great a week later, so they will be a good option to make ahead for celebrations.  Now I just have to think about flavor combinations...