Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

You’ll have to forgive the photo quality here: I mixed the dough in the dead of night and then made the cookies at the crack of dawn so they’d be a nice birthday surprise for the Pie.  This dough is very soft so I would recommend baking your cookies from frozen(or at least chilled).

Start with 1/2 cup butter and cream that together with 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup granulated sugar.

Now crack in 2 eggs, tip in 2 teaspoons vanilla, and scoop in 2/3 cup peanut butter (crunchy or smooth, up to you). Beat the crap out of that.

In another bowl, whisk together 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (or just cinnamon and a touch of nutmeg), and 1/2 teaspoon baking powder. Tip that into the other stuff and mix it until a soft dough forms.

Add in 1 cup oats and 1 1/3 cups peanut butter chips (that’s basically a whole package). Mix, mix, mix!

Roll the dough into golf-ball-sized chunks, set them on a baking sheet, and freeze them (or don’t – but this is what I did in order to keep the secret).

Once they’re frozen, transfer them to an airtight freezer bag if you’re not making all of them right away.

When you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven to 350°F and set your cookie balls on a baking sheet – leave a decent amount of space between them. If the dough is soft, squish the cookies a bit to flatten them. If not, then shove them in the oven for a while and squish them after about 5 minutes. I baked these for about 12 minutes, until the bottoms were a dark brown and the tops were golden. Leave them to solidify on the pan while they cool and then leave them on a table for your husband to discover when he wakes up in the morning.

Cookies for breakfast? Yes please!