Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies for the Boys

I know I've been neglecting this blog woefully, and the truth is I haven't been in the kitchen much because I don't feel that great all the time, on top of which lately we'd been packing up to move to the U.S. so the combination of being almost 5 months pregnant and packing to move trans-atlantically was not conducive to finding more time to be in the kitchen, but sometimes there are really good reasons to be in the kitchen even if you don't really want to be, and this was a doubly good reason as far as I was concerned.

First, although a nun from a local mission was going to come by to take whatever dry foods and ingredients we'd left behind that could be used for the mission's soup kitchen, I wanted to use as much of my large stock of prime ingredients as possible before we left to reduce any waste.

Second A., as a former member of the Armed Forces, was always taking leftover cake and baked goodies (particularly from the Daring Baker challenges) down to the "boys" at the local base. I affectionately refer to them as the boys although the guys who usually eat my baked goods are officers, though there is the occasional 17 year-old private. Anyway, they're all boys to me, and there are rotations of them coming and going back from Iraq and Afghanistan, so it always makes me feel good when he drops baked goods off for those guys because the least anyone can do for them is show them some appreciation for the hard job that they do, and the truth is that they aren't paid handsomely, they aren't even given proper equipment when they go out there, and I know from A.'s testimony that they never get anything close to home-baked goods at the base commissary. (It doesn't hurt my baker's ego either that they eat the stuff I send down there in a matter of literally minutes).

So having a lot of leftover peanut butter and chocolate chips and tons of flour and all sort of other things, and knowing full well that they love peanut butter chocolate chip cookies having made a batch for them once before, I decided to make these PBCC cookies from a recipe I got off of Smitten Kitchen and which comes originally from the Magnolia Bakery.

I made two double batches of these, which made about 200 cookies, and I also made Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies, though I substituted almond butter for the regular butter and was then forced to add milk and maple syrup to make the dough smoother to work with, but they turned out pretty well anyway. Who knew.