So, I wanted to try a new recipe today. But what new recipe to try? And how to find a recipe to try? Well.....I stumbled upon a wonderful website: SuperCook --basically you type in a list of ingredients you have and it searched several different websites to find recipes you already have the ingredients for! This is especially good for me considering that the combination of living in the city and not having a car makes going to the grocery store for a last-minute ingredient quite an ordeal. So, I found a recipe for....."Magic Peanut Butter Middles." Here is a chronicle of the magical journey!

Making the middles (simply peanut butter and powdered sugar):As you can see (above) I had to add a little bit of extra peanut butter because originally I used extra-crunchy and so the mixture was too dry. The finished product:And here is where all those years of rolling Sausage Balls and Russian Teacakes came in handy







At this point, I put the tray of peanut butter balls in the fridge to chill and harden while I started the outer chocolate cookie part er.... cracked open a nice cold Diet Coke. On a side note, I all but stopped drinking pop when I moved to my first apartment over4 years ago simply because it was too hard to haul home from the grocery store on the train. Now, though, Mark and I decided to get some so that we wouldn't have to pay $2.50 for a 2-liter when we order pizza. The problem: now I drink it all the time. But there is a solution on the horizon: keep it in the basement!


Here is the start of the cookie dough. Light and fluffy!








And here it is again after I added the cocoa/flour/baking soda mixture.







This is where the recipe turns into a little bit more of a pain in the ass. By the end, though, I had found a pretty easy way to wrap the peanut butter balls in the chocolate cookie dough. Basically, I flattened it out and then rather than just rounding the chocolate dough around the PB, I treated it more like a present to be wrapped (making two sides meet and leaving the ends open) and then pinching the ends closed....as such:









Ready for the oven!








The recipe said to flatten them with a glass dipped in sugar, but they were already pretty flat, so I only did that on one of the two trays...just to see if it would make a difference. It didn't really.






Caught in the act! (Not really--this was posed. I made him freeze so I could take the picture.)







The middle! It's a magical peanut butter middle! Overall, they taste pretty good, but I don't think they're quite worth the trouble. In general I tend to avoid recipes that require you to roll things into balls....the trauma of so many sausage balls in my youth! Unfortunately, the food processor chopped up the chunks from the chunky PB a lot; it would've been nice to have that texture. But they were good, I guess. I won't make them again.


And here's the damage. And Mom, I was going to wash the dishes by hand....but then I remembered that the dishwasher would wash them for me!






So, there you have it: Magic Peanut Butter Middles.