Spiced habanero peanut butter cookies

The bread mix wasn’t the only thing my sister (who has requested that I refer to her as “the cool sister” from now on) gave me.  I also got a jar of habanero peanut butter, and what better way to try it out than to make peanut butter cookies with it?  .  

No, I'm not being sponsored by Asskickin' (not the company anyway). 

Well, I guess this is the good stuff because it separated.  The oil is red. I like how this is going so far. “Maybe they aren’t fucking around”, thought I.  I tasted a bit and indeed they are not.  I’m getting the full effect of both peanut butter and straight hot sauce.  I guess if you want to make your own you could just add some ground habanero or hot sauce to regular peanut butter.  By the by, once it’s been stirred up it doesn’t look or smell any different from regular peanut butter, which could make it awesome for playing practical jokes.  Also, you didn’t hear that from me.  This is probably a good time to mention that intentionally feeding someone something that they’re allergic to without them knowing can land you in very serious legal trouble so don’t be too much of a jerk.   

There are a million different, yet highly similar, recipes for peanut butter cookies so don’t feel like you have to use the one I’m using.  As long as peanut butter ends up baked into some sort of cookie-like confectionery you should be golden.  In my opinion, the focus of peanut butter cookies should be peanuts, so this recipe is pretty much straight peanut butter topped with peanuts. I think that actually makes it gluten-free.

You will need:

Some marriage of hot pepper and peanut butter

Eggs

White sugar

Baking soda

Vanilla extract

Salt

Thai spiced peanuts (You can buy these from some grocery stores or make your own)

Butter or baking parchment
Price range: $20 - $30

The following recipe may need to be tweaked if you're using crap like Skippy but that’s really more of a problem for you than for me, isn’t it? Preheat your over to 350.  Grease or lay baking parchment on a cookie sheet.  Mix together a cup of peanut butter and a cup of sugar until it’s thoroughly blended.  If there are any lumps in the sugar try to break them up before you start mixing.  The resulting dough is really sticky and thick so stirring out any of the little bastards is a bit of a pain.  Stir in one egg in, ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract, 1 teaspoon of baking powder and a pinch of salt.  Happily, I now get to revisit my favorite part of the spiced prune and cheese pudding.  Put about 1/3 of a cup of peanuts into a resealable bag, smash them up with something that your ex gave you until they’re ground to whatever consistency you desire, and stir them into the dough.  Roll the dough into balls and place them on the baking sheet.  Cookies made with this recipe don’t spread much so they don’t need that much room. Depending on how big you make them, you should get between 18 and 24 cookies.

Now lightly press a fork into each one.  This flattens them out, which makes them cook more evenly and makes them look kinda cool.

Cook them for 20 minutes. They should come out really soft.  They firmed up a bit after they cooled but not very much. I mean, they're wads of peanut butter after all.

Wow.  Peanut butter and pad thai got drunk and had a love child.  A love child that listens to punk rock, has 3 girlfriends, and is full of hot sauce.  These are wonderfully peanut buttery and sweet.  The combination of heat, thai spices, and peanut is really tasty and the texture is very pleasant.  It isn’t as strong as the beer bread but it’s still pretty hot.  They also smell like pad thai.  The effect is kind of weird but it’s not bad.   In addition to how good they taste, I think they could be really versitle.  They would be great for a chili festival or with beer and pizza or teaching roommates, pets, and rascally, Dickensian urchins a learned aversion to stealing your food.  Stay queer!