Home made peanut butter and chewy chocolate orange cookies

My mother is a peanut butter connoisseur. She loves the stuff, and has tried pretty much every variety going. To the best of my knowledge, she has never tried to make her own, so I made her a batch! To keep it fair, I baked cookies for my father. These cookies are pretty good when made according to the original recipe. But I just can’t leave things alone and had to tweak them. I may just have gone slightly over the top – but it is Christmas and they taste great!



Making peanut butter is very straightforward, but creates a lot of mess! I roasted one pound of shelled peanuts at 140 C for fifteen minutes then ground them to a paste in the food processor.



When the paste was smooth enough, I added two tablespoons of peanut oil and a good sprinkle of salt and mixed them in (with the food processor) for about thirty seconds. (Based on this recipe here)



As it’s Christmas, I decorated the peanut butter jars with red and green ribbons!



Ingredients for cookies (Large batch! Recipe adapted from this one)
250g plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
170g melted butter (unsalted)
200g soft dark brown sugar
100g caster sugar
1 tbsp vanilla
1 tbsp orange essence
1 tbsp speculaas spice (see speculaas muffins for spice recipe)
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 crushed Terry’s chocolate orange! (substitute other orange flavoured chocolate if you wish)



Preheat oven to 170 C. Sift together the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda. In a separate bowl, mix the melted butter with the sugar (both sorts) until well combined. Add the vanilla, orange essence, speculaas spice, egg and egg yolk and beat until well mixed.



Add the flour/salt/sodium bicarbonate mixture and stir to combine. Then stir in the chocolate. Drop the cookie dough onto a baking sheet, a tablespoon per cookie (leave about 10cm space between cookies). Don’t flatten the dough! Bake for about 10 minutes, until the edges start to brown.



Allow to cool on the baking tray for a few minutes before transferring to a cooling rack. Christmas packaging optional!