This recipe is for the ultimate chocolate + peanut butter lovers out there!

Thick soft and chewy peanut butter cookies loaded with milk and dark peanut butter cups AND mini dark chocolate chips. You get peanut butter + chocolate flavour in every single bite! Keep scrolling down to see how crazy delicious and gooey they are inside!

How to make thick cookies:

To make these cookies nice and thick, it's important to refrigerate the dough. Even just 1 hour is good, but 2 hours is better.

The way to quickly make cookies thick is to add more flour, but that is not ideal! Adding more flour will dry out the dough and dilute the flavour. Try to avoid this and have the patience to refrigerate the dough even for a little while.

Why do you need to chill cookie dough?

When you first make cookie dough, the flour is incorporated but not fully hydrated. When you think about it, cookie dough (although soft in texture) is actually very low moisture. The only moisture is usually coming from eggs and it's not a lot -- not like a cake batter. So, the flour needs time to suck in and absorb that moisture to truly become part of the dough.

Placing the dough in the fridge gives time for the wheat starch and wheat proteins to hydrate and this leads to better flavour (i.e. less of a raw doughy taste), and it improves the texture of the cookies since the moisture is locked in. Also, the baking soda is dispersed in the flour before it is mixed in the dough... so giving time for the dry ingredients to hydrate also means that the baking soda will be more evenly absorbed into the dough. That results in more even browning for cookies that are evenly golden and evenly cooked.

What type of chocolate to use:

You can of course add regular chocolate chips, but I really liked these mini chocolate chips! You would use the same quantity as regular chocolate chips, but since they are smaller, they go further and you get more little chocolate bits per bite! It pairs well with the big hunks of peanut butter cups.

If you want giant puddles of melty chocolate, then use a chopped up dark chocolate bar. Chocolate bars typically have a higher cocoa butter content so they melt more readily and spread more than chips do.

I used mini peanut butter cups here... but not the *MINI* ones... the bite-sized ones. I cut them into quarters. If you use the really small mini ones, then just cut them in half.

The results:

The peanut butter cups (chocolate, peanut butter filling and all!) melt into these ooey gooey puddles.

The cookies bake up with these deep golden brown edges and soft chewy insides.

The goo-factor is real here! These cookies are so soft and moist in the middle and SO INCREDIBLY good while warm.

However even days after you make them they are still so soft and plush.

These are a peanut butter lover's dream! Make a batch and just try and resist eating them straight off the pan 🙂

These cookies keep for 1 week in an airtight container and they are DELICIOUS dunked in a glass of milk.

Get into it!

Enjoy.