Recipe: Salted Peanut Butter, Pretzel and Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies

 

This cookies should come with a warning: one cookie is never enough. Combining salted peanuts, pretzels and dark chocolate would have been a madcap idea once upon a time, but now it seems like everyone is on the salty and sweet bandwagon. With good reason. It's deliriously good.

There's something intriguing about the way salty and sweet play off against each other. The sweetness of a dessert can be overwhelming on the palate sometimes, but if you introduce a salty element then suddenly your tongue is twitching, your palate is reinvigorated and I always find my appetite is immediately primed for more.

Combining peanut butter and pretzels has been an obsession of mine since I had my first scoop of Ben & Jerry's Chubby Hubby ice cream over ten years ago - a mix of vanilla malt ice cream with swirls of peanut butter and nuggets of fudge-covered peanut butter pretzels. Designing a cookie with peanut butter, pretzels and dark chocolate sounded like my kind of heaven. A sprinkle of Murray River sea salt flakes made it even better.

I happened to find a bag of peanut pretzels in an Eastern European deli but they're not really essential in this recipe - normal salted pretzels will do. These cookies veer between salty and sweet with every mouthful which makes them dangerously addictive. Even more so if you're a peanut-lover like I am. Bake a double batch. Maybe three. Don't say I didn't warn you.


Griski Macedonian peanut pretzels; dark chocolate chunks; and raw cookie dough

Salted Peanut Butter, Pretzel and Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies

250g (1 cup) salted butter, softened
250g (1 cup) crunchy peanut butter
200g (1 cup) brown sugar
100g (1/2 cup) sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 eggs
450g (3 cups) plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
200g dark chocolate, chopped roughly
150g (1 cup salted) peanuts
60g (1 cup) smashed salted pretzels
Murray River pink salt flakes for sprinkling

1. Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F) or 160°C (320°F) if fan-forced.
2. Cream butter, peanut butter and sugars using an electric mixer until pale and fluffy.
3. Add vanilla extract and eggs and beat well.
4. Add the flour, baking powder and baking soda and mix until combined.
5. Stir through the dark chocolate, peanuts and pretzels.
6. Roll the mixture into balls the size of a teaspoon and place on a tray lined with baking paper, leaving a gap of about five centimetres between each one. Press each ball down lightly with a fork and then sprinkle with Murray River pink salt flakes.
7. Bake at 180C for 8-10 minutes.
8. Allow to cool on a wire rack.

Cookies before baking


Salted Peanut Butter, Pretzel and Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies

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