Ah, love is in the air. Or at least, candy is. Any grocery store you step into has been lined with pink, red, and white heart-shaped chocolates, conversation hearts, and more since the end of Christmas. But, yes, it is now officially February. The month of the valentine.
That's not exactly why I chose to make heart-shaped chocolate cookies with little white and pink raspberry HERSHEY'S HUGS in the center. I woke up at 3:30 in the morning on Saturday unable to go back to sleep. So decided to do some 4:00 a.m. baking, the results of which I could bring in to work (I work all day at the public library on Saturdays). I had also bought the HUGS a few weeks ago, waiting until there was enough time for a new baking project that I could share with my coworkers there. It's been a while. Ever since I got my second job at a college library in mid-January, I haven't had as much time to bake for the public library, so maybe this was a little valentine to them, a "hug" with each cookie brought in that Saturday morning and quite gone by Saturday afternoon.
The good thing was, Chocolate Peanut Butter Hearts are so easy to make that it wasn't an overwhelming task for a slightly groggy librarian to undertake at 4:00 a.m. I basically enhanced my Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookie Bites recipe (combining it with my Peanut Butter Thumbprints recipe), pressed the dough into a heart-shaped cookie cutter:
...and then added the HUGS after baking.
Ingredients:
1 cup chocolate peanut butter spread (I use Sunland brand)
1 cup white sugar
1 egg
16-18 HERSHEY'S HUGS (white chocolate wrapped in milk chocolate--I used the seasonal Valentine's Day "raspberry" flavor)
Directions:
1.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a mixing bowl, combine the chocolate peanut butter spread, sugar and egg, stirring with a fork until all ingredients are well incorporated.
2.) Use your fingers to keep the dough together and form small 1-inch balls by rolling the dough in the palms of your hands. Set on a baking sheet lined with parchment (NOT wax) paper and press a small, heart-shaped cookie cutter around each ball until they become heart-shaped themselves. Remove excess dough from the sides of the cookie cutter and flatten the hearts slightly before baking.
3.) Bake approximately 10 minutes (keep an eye on them so they don't over bake) until the edges of the cookies just begin to harden. Remove from the oven and immediately press a chocolate HUG into the center of each cookie. Allow the cookies to cool on the baking sheet for 5 more minutes, then carefully transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. The hugs might melt a little. That's okay. They taste delicious in "puddle" form too.
Am I cheating by basically remaking the same cookie I've already made and re-blogging the results with only a slight variation? Well, the cookies still received so many compliments, the pictures look awesome (pink and white stripes can be quite fashionable!) and I did promise to blog about something chocolately for Valentine's Day. There will be more chocolate, of course, since Valentine's Day is still over a week away and I'll need to make more treats for my family and friends then. But I'm just grateful that I finally had time to bake something again. Even if it was at 4:00 in the morning. I guess that shows just how much I love to bake, and how much I love the people I'm bake for.
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