Dairy-free/Egg-free/Nut-freeHoliday cookie season. Before we had food allergic-children, any day leading up to the holidays were easily among our most favorite times of the year, along with any one of the other 364 days on the calendar.
Things are necessarily different now, but there's no need to despair. On a recent trip down the candy aisle at our local grocery store, as we were walking by the Hershey's Kisses, we were met by a recipe card for Peanut Butter Blossoms, starring melt-in-your-mouth but very much off limits Hershey's Kisses, and sometimes toxic and highly offensive peanut butter.
Our recent discovery (thank you Ms Lauren!) of sunflower seed butter, aka sunnut butter, has made these cookies much easier to replicate in a food allergy-safe way. Straight out of the jar, our kids want nothing to do with sunnut butter, but baked into a cookie, the taste is somewhat mild and very well tolerated by our otherwise sunnut butter-hating children. It's very bewildering, why they don't like sunnut butter. Except for the finish, it is very very very close in taste to peanut butter.
We considered making our own version of Hershey's Kisses, but opted against it. After all, that would have entailed a LOT of effort, and we go for easy whenever we can. Instead of melting safe chocolate and solidifying it into coins to later press into the cookie tops, when the time came we just pressed three or four chocolate chips where one much larger Hershey's Kiss would have gone. Worked like a charm.
We're providing the recipe as written by Hershey's, and noting the changes we made where appropriate.
Ingredients
- 48 Hershey's Kisses (we used about 200 dairy-free/nut-free chocolate chips)
- 1/2 cup shortening
- 3/4 cup Reese's Creamy Peanut Butter (we used 3/4 cup creamy sunnut butter)
- 1/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
- 1 egg (we used one egg worth of Ener-G Egg Replacer)
- 2 tablespoons milk (we used soymilk)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (we used this, even though our soymilk is vanilla flavored; you could omit it)
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- granulated sugar, for rolling the dough in
Steps
- Heat oven to 375 degrees. Remove wrappers from chocolates.
- Beat shortening and peanut butter in a large bowl until well blended. Add the 1/3 cup granulated sugar and the 1/3 cup brown sugar; beat until fluffy. Add the egg, milk, and vanilla; beat well. Stir together flour, baking soda and salt; gradually beat into peanut butter mixture.
- Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Roll in granulated sugar; place on ungreased cookie sheet.
- Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until lightly browned. Immediately press a chocolate kiss into center of each cookie; cookie will crack around edges. Remove from cookie sheet to wire rack. Cool completely. About 4 dozen cookies.
Notes
- Egg Replacer works best if you prepare it with water before adding it to your other ingredients, so be sure to do that for optimal results.
- Our recipe made nearly 6 dozen cookies, so maybe they were a little on the small side, but the baking time didn't change. The three or four chocolate chips we added created the exactly right ratio of chocolate to cookie, so consider this when rolling balls of your cookie dough. Adjust the size of your cookie dough balls to suit your taste.
- When the cookies came out of the oven, we enlisted adult help in the kitchen to get the chips on the cookies before the cookies got too hard and crumbly. The edges are supposed to crack, but we did have to act fast to get the chips to stick.
- After a day or two on the counter, store these in the refrigerator. There was some weird ingredient reaction as they sat out, and the center of the cookie had a funky green tinge. We tested multiple cookies and they all had it. Since mold doesn't grow in such a uniform fashion, and since the cookies smelled and tasted fine, we moved them to the fridge, and the green business cleared up. Anyone know an Alton Brown we can ask about that?
