New cookies!

Hey everyone! I have been so busy that I completely forgot about blogging! This week, Emily and I had to come up with a new homemade cookie for the cookie plate that is an option on the dessert menu. We chose a peanut butter cookie, and made it "spiced" by adding cinnamon and ginger. The cookies were delicious, but we both agreed they needed something more. Emily and I made a jam of huckleberries and raspberries and put a small dollop between two of the peanut butter cookies like a little peanut butter and jelly sandwich! Thus, the new cookie was born! There has been lots of positive feedback so far! The peanut butter cookie was not as simple as it sounds. I made the peanut butter that went into the recipe! To my surprise, there isn't actually butter in peanut butter (maybe you guys already knew that but I had no idea hahaha). Peanut butter is actually just roasted peanuts, a little bit of oil, salt, and sugar. I roasted some peanuts in the oven for 10 minutes then threw them in a food processor with two teaspoons of salt and three teaspoons of sugar. As it was blending together, I slowly added two tablespoons of corn oil and the peanut mixture started to clump together. After around 20 or 25 minutes of mixing in the food processor (I constantly had to stop it and mix everything around with a spatula), we had made a beautiful peanut butter. BUT WAIT... that's not it. Emily wanted perfectly smooth peanut butter, way creamier than Jif or Smuckers. So I had to run it through an extremely fine strainer called a Shinwa. It took another twenty minutes to push all that peanut butter through the Shinwa. Such a pain in the butt.... but in the end the cookies were great! Hope everyone is having a good week!