Peanut Butter Marble Cookies

When it comes to baking I'm not typically the first to volunteer to take on the project but for this assignment I decided to take on a baking book to expand my abilities in the kitchen. This being said the first recipe I read and decided to make was "Crispy's Irresistible Peanut Butter Marbles" (Weber 81).

Ingredients you will need are:

• 1 package (18 ounces) refrigerated peanut butter cookie dough
• 2 cups M&M's minis milk chocolate candies
• 1 cup crisp rice cereal (optional)
• 1 package (18 ounces) refrigerated sugar cookie dough
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Now, being an amateur at baking I though this recipe is a good start for me because it calls for pre-made dough rather than me having to make it from scratch.

The first step in the instructions is (after washing your hands of course) to separate the ingredients into two separate large mixing bowls. With the peanut butter dough, 1/2 cup of rice cereal and 1 cup of M&M's in one and in the other the sugar cookie dough, cocoa powder and stirring in the other 1 cup of M&M's and 1/2 cup of rice cereal (Weber 81).

The next step is to marble the cookie. Before reading this recipe I never thought that "marble" is a term used in baking but I looked it up and found out that when they say "marble cookies" they don't mean the kind of rock that you use for you kitchen counters, but they mean the aesthetic of the cookies should have the swirled marble look. To give the cookie this marble look you take half of the peanut butter dough and half of the now chocolate sugar cookie dough and mix it together. This book also gave a very important tip to making this kind of cookie: don't over mix the cookie (Weber 81). This may seem like a simple and unnecessary thing to be saying but if you over mix the two dough's then the marble look will be lost. After you finish doing this repeat this step with the other two halves of the dough.

In the third step you are instructed to form your marbled dough into two 8 by 2 inch logs and to wrap them in plastic wrap. Post-wrapping the book says to "refrigerate logs for at least two hours" (Weber 81).

 

Almost there.......

Done!!!

After the two short hours you are almost ready to get your bake on! My advice is to preheat the oven as soon as you take the cookies out of the refrigerator so when you are ready you can put the cookies in right away.

The final step is to cut the logs into the cookies (so about a fourth of an inch for each slice) and place them about two inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. After that you are ready to put them in the oven (which hopefully was already preheated at 350 degrees) for 12 - 14 minutes. Weber said to take them out when they are looking slightly browned. Finally, let them cool for one minute on a cooling sheet and either enjoy or store in a tightly closed container.

Even after making these cookies and reading through all the steps and tips I still cam up with a couple questions that I haven't found an answer to:

Why is it necessary to refrigerate the marbled cookie dough for so long and what would happen if we skipped that step?

Weber, Louis, ed. M&M'S Fun Stuff Cookbook. N.p.: Publications International, n.d. Print.