I love peanut butter blossoms. They were always one of my favorite holiday cookies. Maybe my absolute favorite, but every time I say that about something I find myself writing a post for something else a week later and then declaring that as my all-time favorite. So let’s just say I’m a big fan of peanut butter blossoms and leave it at that. So this year, I decided it was time to make a vegan version. I thought it would be easy. But nope! I almost didn’t even name these “peanut butter blossoms.” Chocolate peanut butter thumbprint cookies might be more accurate. Classic peanut butter blossoms are topped with Hershey Kisses, and as you can see from the photos, only one cookie is topped with anything resembling a kiss. I ended up with a single perfect cookie, and yeah, you got me — I totally used it for my photos. Because how could I let that beauty go to waste? My thinking was this: I’d veganize the cookies by swapping out butter for vegan butter and eggs for flax eggs. Easy! And that worked. The cookie making part is easy — whip up some peanut butter, vegan butter, sugar, and flax egg with an electric mixer. Stir in your dry ingredients, shape into balls, roll in sugar, and bake away. But instead of pressing a Kiss into each cookie, I’d make a little thumbprint dent, and then pipe some ganache in the dent, in the shape of a Kiss. Brilliant, right? The problem is this: the temperature of the ganache is super critical! Too warm and it’ll just settle into a chocolate puddle. Too cool, and it’ll be too solid to pipe. I got it to that happy semi-solid temperature, but then it cooled in the pastry bag. First it clogged up the tip, then it burst the whole bag (which was, admittedly, a piece of junk I got at the dollar store). It made a huge mess and seeing all that chocolate go to waste was rather painful. So, if you’ve got mad piping skills, feel free to squirt some perfect Kisses on your blossoms. The rest of us will just spoon ours on top, and it’ll taste just as good. My husband pointed out why these suckers are better that regular old kiss cookies. With classic peanut butter blossoms, you take a bite and the whole Kiss comes out at once. With these, you the ganache stays put, so you get chocolate and cookie in every bite.
More Vegan Holiday Cookies
Vegan Gingerbread CookiesVegan Chocolate Chip CookiesVegan Oatmeal Raisin CookiesVegan Sugar CookiesVegan Chocolate Cookies
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