Cooking with Chaos and Confetti: Aurora Magical Kiss Cookies

Cookbook: Disney Princess Baking (Amazon Affiliate Link)

Recipe Name: Aurora Magical Kiss Cookies

Ingredients: 

•  1 & ¼ cup creamy peanut butter, room temperature
• ⅔ cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• ½ cup all-purpose flour
• 25 chocolate kiss candies, unwrapped

In our New Year, New Goals post, we committed to trying to make one new recipe from one of our themed cookbooks each month. Welcome to Month #1 of our Cookbook challenge! While I won’t share the full recipe here since I don’t want to spoil the cookbook, you can find a similar recipe by searching for “peanut butter blossom cookies”. 

Chaos bought me the Disney Princess Baking Book for my birthday in April 2021. I loved it immediately and spent a long time flipping through pages. Like most of the cookbooks we own though, it then went on a shelf in our pantry – out of sight, out of mind. I’ve pulled it out a few times since then, but most of the recipes require ingredients I don’t readily have on hand, so I tend to default to my normal strategy of searching recipes on the internet. So, when I pulled the book out again for our challenge this month, I went with the path of least resistance – making the easiest possible recipe that I had technically never made before. 

Aurora Magical Kiss Cookies are a type of peanut butter blossom cookie, something often seen on cookie platters around Christmas time. I already have a soft peanut butter cookie recipe I love for my cookie plates, so I always make a sugar blossom cookie instead. Since I am already familiar with blossom cookies and I already had all the required ingredients on hand, making the Aurora Magical Kiss cookies seemed like a no-brainer way to start our cooking challenge. 

My initial thought when reviewing the recipe was that I was surprised at the simplicity. As you can see from the ingredient list, there is no butter or shortening or even baking soda/baking powder. Peanut butter is definitely the main ingredient. Side note, our beagles love peanut butter and were very interested in the creation of this recipe.

While making up the dough, I found it to be very dry. It’s very possible that I overmixed it, as it started to come together faster than I had anticipated, but the lack of butter/shortening definitely means the recipe is lacking moisture so I think some crumbliness is to be expected. 

The dough itself was easy to roll into balls and baked quickly in the oven – I pulled mine out right at 10 minutes and started to pop in the Hershey Kisses. I used dark chocolate Hershey Kisses, as those were what we had in the pantry. As you can see from the pictures, the cookies cracked quite a bit when I pressed in the Hershey Kisses. Again, I think this was due to the crumbliness of the dough. The cookies still held their shape despite the cracks and firmed up nicely on the cooling rack. 

Confetti’s Thoughts on Taste: The cookies themselves were quite tasty, if I do say so myself. They were a little chewier than I personally like my cookies (I prefer a softer bite), but I think the recipe delivered on what it intended. 

Chaos’ Thoughts on Taste: I love it when Confetti does some baking and I get to share in her treats afterward.  I’ll admit there are few cookies I don’t like, so these peanut butter cookies were great to me.  The peanut butter taste and consistency were strong, but I like peanut butter so no problem there.  The little bit of dark chocolate on top just makes the whole thing better.

Stay tuned for next month, when we will be making a recipe out of the Marvel Eat The Universe cookbook (Amazon Affiliate Link)!