Chocolate Peanut Butter Sandwich (Wedding) Cookies

A year ago today, I married Bobby. It was truly the best day I could ever have imagined, but the planning was incredibly stressful. I did a lot of the detail work myself – I made the invitations and a lot of the centerpieces, which, looking back, I don’t really recommend. I would have enjoyed the planning process a lot more if I’d been a little more hands-off. One DIY thing that I highly recommend is making baked goods for wedding favors. But not just any baked goods: these peanut butter and chocolate sandwich cookies are absolutely perfect in every way. They’re delicious (we got SO many compliments on them), they freeze very well, they’re that wonderful combination of salty/sweet, chewy/crunchy – and they look super cute in little boxes, tied with ribbon.

I asked my mom to make the favors for my wedding, partially to save money, and partially to send guests home with a favor that they would actually enjoy having. The best wedding favors are edible, tasty, and of course, visually pleasing, with bonus points if you can personalize them with a simple tag or sticker added to the packaging. We decided on peanut butter and chocolate for the cookies, since I chose a white chocolate raspberry wedding cake – something Bobby had absolutely no interest in eating. If you read my last post, you know that peanut butter and chocolate is the only flavor combination in the world, according to Bobby.

We were inspired by Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Ganache Sandwich Cookies from Two Peas & Their Pod, and didn’t do a lot to change the look of the cookie itself, because they really are stunning. But the original version wasn’t exactly what I was looking for flavor-wise, or make-ahead-wise, so we had to do some serious recipe experimentation.

The first task was finding a peanut butter cookie recipe that was stiff enough to sandwich without falling apart, but soft enough to give when bitten into, so the frosting wouldn’t squish out the sides. It also had to freeze well, so it could be made ahead of time – I can’t imagine how we would’ve pulled this off if my mom hadn’t been working on them in the months leading up to the wedding. After rounds of testing with different brands of peanut butter, flourless vs flour-filled dough (the version we made is not gluten-free, but the original is, so give it a look if you want something gluten-free), and different levels of sweetness, we settled on our cookie, and got to work creating the fillings. We loved the way Two Peas & Their Pod did it, piling on a sweet, creamy, peanut butter filling and a rich, chocolate ganache, but needed to experiment with them to make sure the flavors went perfectly with our revised peanut butter cookie. The thing about chocolate and peanut butter is that you have to be very careful with the balance of sweetness/saltiness/bitterness, to keep the flavor from being cloying or bland. We used my brothers as taste testers, and had them try so many combinations that they actually started joking about wanting to eat anything but wedding cookies. They’ve gotten over it, I think, because the batch I made for this post got eaten in all of two hours, once I’d finished photographing it.

We put three cookies in each favor box, which meant we had to make about 300 of them – 600 peanut butter cookies to sandwich together. Starting about two months out from the wedding, we made the peanut butter cookies and the fillings in large batches, frosted and sandwiched them, wrapped them well, and then immediately froze them. We weighed the dough and the exact amount of frosting that went on each cookie, so they’d be perfectly uniform. They keep so well in the freezer, even with the frosting, that when they defrost they taste and feel like they were baked that morning. They’re little peanut butter and chocolate miracles. We put them in favor boxes the evening before the wedding, straight from the freezer. Since the frosting was rock-solid, they were easy to package neatly, and they defrosted perfectly overnight.

The process of making tons of these cookies wedding-perfect is time-consuming and repetitive, and demands attention to detail and lots of freezer space. It would be monumentally more difficult to execute for a very large wedding, especially if you’re not already an experienced baker. That said, these can be made literal months in advance – so you’ll have plenty of time to practice, and the effort yields superbly satisfying results. The recipe I’m posting here is scaled to make about 36 sandwich cookies, as opposed to 300, so the concept is perfect for smaller events as well. If you don’t require perfection and uniformity, you can skip weighing the dough and fillings, and the results will still be completely delicious. It’s my plan to make these every October 8th for the rest of my life…and freeze a bunch and save them to eat later in the year, because why not? They will always remind me of the most wonderful evening, being surrounded by my friends and family, wearing my princess dress, and marrying the love of my life. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a cookie, but there’s no cookie better suited than these.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Sandwich (Wedding) Cookies

This recipe is heavily adapted from Peanut Butter Chocolate Ganache Sandwich Cookies from Two Peas & Their Pod

Ingredients

Peanut Butter Cookies

  • 2 1/2 cups flour 300g
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 14 Tbsps butter 198g
  • 1 cup sugar 200g
  • 1 cup brown sugar 215g
  • 1 cup + 2 Tbsps peanut butter 284g
  • 2 eggs

Creamy Peanut Butter Frosting

  • 2 Tbsps peanut butter 32g
  • 1 Tbsp butter, softened 14g
  • 3 Tbsps powdered sugar 25g
  • 2 Tbsp + 1 tsp milk
  • 1 cup, scant powdered sugar 115g

Chocolate Ganache

  • 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips 85g
  • 1/4 cup heavy cream
  • 4 Tbsps salted butter 56g
  • 6 Tbsps cocoa 30g

Instructions

  1. Make the cookies: stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside. Cream the butter with the two sugars, and then cream in the peanut butter. Stir in the eggs.

    2. Chill the dough at least 4 hours, or overnight. Roll into 18 g balls, and place on baking sheet. Press the balls with the back of a fork to create a criss-cross pattern on the tops. Chill dough balls while preheating oven to 350 degrees (or while previous tray is baking). Bake for 7 minutes, 40 seconds; turn tray, bake for 2 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

    3. Make the peanut butter frosting by adding all of the ingredients to a mixer in the order listed, and beating until well combined after each addition of sugar, and then until fluffy. 

    4. To make the chocolate ganache, heat the heavy cream in the microwave just until very warm (for us, that was 25 seconds). Pour over chocolate chips in a heavy bowl. Let sit 1 minute, then stir until smooth. Melt the butter in a separate bowl, and stir in the cocoa until smooth. Combine the two chocolates. Allow to cool to room temperature.

    5. To assemble the cookies, place 8g of ganache (roughly 1/2 Tbsp) on one cookie, and 16g of peanut butter frosting on another cookie. Press the two cookies gently together. 

    Cookies will be good in the freezer for up to a year, but will be at their best quality if used within 4 months of freezing.