How to Make Chocolate Kiss Cookies

Half-price Halloween candy, anyone?

Usually, I don't eat Hershey's Kisses. They taste sort of ashy and buggy and sour to me. But they were on sale the day after Halloween, and there's no better way of disposing of them than the Chocolate Kiss Cookie.

Yum.

They're perfectly lazy little cookies, too, so easy to make! All you do is combine your wet ingredients--

Oh, wait . . .

[rattling through the fridge--a shuffling of pickle jars, a brandishing of wilting lettuce heads]


Where's the milk?

[the fridge door swings ominously shut]

Well, shucks.

First, you beg your poor, long-suffering, sainted mother to go to the grocery store to pick up the milk that you thought you had when you preheated the oven.

While she's gone, you really get down to business. Cream the shortening (butter works too, but shortening keeps these nice and puffy) together with your white and brown sugars. Then beat the peanut butter in the mixture until the whole thing's a little fluffy. Then you add the vanilla and the egg and wait for the milk to arrive.

In the meantime, you mix your dry ingredients (the flour, baking soda, and salt) together in a separate bowl, and take a few minutes to unwrap precisely forty-two Hershey's Kisses.

Once your sweet, kind, cookie-hungry mother returns, you can beat the milk, egg, and vanilla into your dough. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mix in a couple of installations until everything's well combined. After that, use your fancy schmancy scooper to form dough balls. Roll each ball between your palms so that it's kinda round-ish.

Roll these in white sugar and throw 'em on the pan.

Bake for ten minutes or until the cookies start to turn golden brown on top.

Now here's the really important part: once you pull the pan out of the oven, never, NEVER wait to smush your room-temperature Kisses onto your oven-hot cookies. Not even to take a picture for your blog!

Well, okay, so maybe you can wait ten seconds for your camera to turn on. But if you wait too long before putting the Kisses on top of the cookies, the Kisses won't stick. You'll end up with wonky little peanut butter cookies with dents on top and a handful of naked Kisses rolling around in the bottom of your cookie jar, and that's a sad sight.

Let the cookies sit on the pan to cool for a few minutes, then move them somewhere to finish cooling. Be sure to play with the liquified Kisses by smushing them into funny shapes and twirling their hard tips and generally behaving like a second grader and getting chocolate everywhere.

(This is a very important step.)

Obviously, these cookies are simple, fun, and great to make with kids (or a twenty-five-year-old who enjoys playing with her food). And you get to discover that Hershey Kisses are much improved when melted and smeared all over a peanut-buttery, sugary, chewy little cookie.

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Easy Chocolate Kiss Cookies

From the kitchen of Janet Hammer

Ingredients

1 3/4 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup shortening

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter (or crunchy, if you're kinky like that)

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 egg

extra white sugar for rolling

42 unwrapped Hershey's Kisses

Directions

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

Mix flour, baking soda, and salt in one bowl.

In a second bowl, cream white sugar, brown sugar, and shortening together by beating until the mixture is well-combined and fluffy. Cream peanut butter into the mixture. Add the egg, milk, and vanilla and beat until combined.

Add half of the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and beat until combined. Add the rest of the dry ingredients and combine.

Roll dough into balls 1" in diameter. Roll dough balls in white sugar and place on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove from the oven and press one unwrapped Hershey Kiss onto each cookie's center.

Let cool for as long as you can stand before eating.