Salted Chocolate Covered Pretzel, Chocolate Chip & Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

I know I promised another non-peanut butter cookie but I can’t help when something pops into my head and I have to make it. I am seeing my nut-allergy brother this week, so maybe we’ll fit in a peanut-free cookie. Sunday night baking experimenting tonight resulted in these little beauties: salted chocolate covered pretzel, chocolate chip and peanut butter chip cookies.

I made something similar back in the fall with chocolate covered pretzels, but I did some tweaking to the recipe this time around …. and actually wrote a recipe down for you guys. Some of my measurements are still a bit estimated but I tried to get a little more specific than “a handful of this” or “about a scoop of that” to be more helpful to those of you who are following this recipe.

What I love about these cookies is they really embody that synergy of salty and sweet. And for those of you non-peanut lovers or nut-allergy folks out there, you can modify this recipe by adding more chocolate chips in place of peanut butter chips and removing the peanut butter step completely for a peanut-free version of these that taste just as good.

Chocolate Covered Pretzel Ingredients

  • 4 cups of mini-pretzel twists
  • 1 1/2 cups of milk chocolate chips
  • 1 tablespoon of creamy peanut butter

Step 1: Make the peanut butter chocolate covered pretzels. In a medium saucepan over medium heat melt the chocolate chips. Make sure you constantly stir otherwise the chocolate will burn and clump. Once the chips are melted stir in 1 tablespoon of creamy peanut butter. Feel free to skip this step if you’re not a PB fan. Turn off the heat and add in the pretzels and stir until they are all coated.

Step 2: Spread the chocolate covered pretzels on a greased cookie sheet or one lined with parchment paper. Put in the freezer for at least 45 minutes, or the refrigerator for over an hour until they are hard.

Cookie Ingredients:

  • 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
  • 1/2 cup peanut butter chips
  • 1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter
  • Coarse sea salt

Step 3: Beat butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar in a large mixer until creamy. Add in vanilla extract and two eggs.

Step 4: Add in peanut butter and mix well. In between steps of mixing wet ingredients I always stop and scrape the bowl.

Step 5: Add in the dry ingredients sifted together.

Step 6: Add in peanut butter chips and chocolate chips. Why more chocolate chips than peanut butter chips? Because that’s all I had. You can switch up the ratio any way your heart desires. Don’t like peanut butter? Just go with chocolate chips then. You can mix and match semi-sweet with milk chocolate.

Step 7: Once the chocolate covered pretzels have hardened, take about 3 to 4 cups of them and chop them coarsely. You will most likely be left over with a cup or two of pretzels. Save those for some late night snacking.

Step 8: Add the pretzels into the mixture and mix well. This was a bit of an overload for my mixer, so you can always fold these in outside of the mixer if you want. The most important part is to make sure that the dough is all mixed together well. There’s a good chance there might be a clump of pretzels on the bottom of the mixing bowl, so just make sure everything is incorporated.

Step 8: Drop teaspoon size balls onto a parchment-lined (or sil-pat lined) baking sheet. I use a melon scooper for even size cookies. Sprinkle with a dash of coarse sea salt.

DISASTER STRIKES. So this dough is apparently a bit harder and chunkier than my normal cookie dough, and I got aggressive with the melon scooper and it bit the dust. Thank god for amazon prime shipping, I’ll have a new one in two days: http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-Small-Cookie-Scoop/dp/B0000CCY1E/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1335742923&sr=8-3

Of course once I’m on amazon, I need to buy other baking goodies, and I was in need of another sil-pat anyway: http://www.amazon.com/Silpat-Non-Stick-Baking-2-inches-Sheet/dp/B00008T960/ref=pd_sim_k_8

Step 9: Back to baking. Bake these cookies at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes. Mine took just about 10 minutes and then I let them sit on the tray for about 2 minutes once I take them out of the oven.

There you have it. Sweet and salty synergy at it’s finest. This batch made about 50 cookies. Some cookies were a bit smaller than normal. But if there is one thing I have recently learned, never bring less than 2 dozen cookies to work.