Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

If you love peanut butter and chocolate, Peanut Butter Cup Cookies with mini Reese’s Cups are going to be your new favorite! Part candy, part cookie, these peanut butter treats are irresistible and easy to make.

The best peanut butter cookie ever is shaped like a miniature cupcake and has a Reese’s cup in the center of it. Similar to Peanut Butter Blossoms, these are perfect for Christmas cookie plates, but these peanut butter cup cookies are also welcome anywhere, any time of the year. 

Bring a batch of these to your friends’ house for the game, or to your next book club meeting. Honestly, any reason you can think of to make these cookies is a good one! 

Your friends will love my Chocolate Chip Pudding Cookies and stuffed Chocolate Caramel Cookies too!

A simple to make homemade peanut butter cookie dough is stuffed with miniature peanut butter cups. Then the whole thing is baked together in a mini muffin tin. They are so cute! 

Ready for more peanut butter treats? Make my No-Bake Peanut Butter Cookies, Puppy Chow, or Peanut Butter Cheerio Bars.

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

1. Perfect Sweet and Salty Mix: Peanut butter cookies with chocolate combine two great flavors, giving you a cookie that has complementing sweet and salty flavors. You’ll have a hard time just eating one of these.
2. Homemade: You’ll see recipes for similar cookies made with refrigerated cookie dough. I think that making my own peanut butter cookie dough is easier, less expensive, and tastier. 
3. Reese’s, but better: Sure, you could just eat the mini Reese’s cups, but if you can wrap them in a chewy peanut butter cookie dough, that’s even better. 

Key Ingredients

Complete list of ingredients and amounts can be found in the recipe card below.

• Peanut Butter: You can’t make peanut butter cookies without it! Use creamy peanut butter for this recipe rather than crunchy. 
• Butter, Brown Sugar, Granulated Sugar: The beginning of our cookie dough comes from creaming these ingredients together. A combination of both white and brown sugar gives these cookies the perfect chewiness. Remember to lightly pack the brown sugar when measuring. 
• Egg: You just need one large egg to make these cookies. Let the eggs and butter come to room temperature before mixing the dough. 
• Vanilla Extract: Always use a good quality pure vanilla extract when baking. 
• Milk: A small amount of milk, cream, or half and half adds needed moisture to the dough. 
• Flour, Baking Soda, and Salt: The basic dry ingredients for most cookie recipes. 
• Mini Reese’s Cups: You’ll need 36 miniature Reeses cups to make this recipe. 

How to Make Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

1. Prepare: Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C, and grease a mini muffin pan with baking spray.
2. Mix Wet Ingredients: In a large bowl, beat the butter with peanut butter, sugars, egg, vanilla extract, and milk or cream. 
3. Mix Dry Ingredients: In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt). Then add them to the wet ingredients and mix until just combined. 
4. Portion: Divide the dough into balls that are 1 tablespoon or 25g each. You can use a digital scale or a cookie scoop to measure them. Add the dough to the muffin pan, placing one dough ball into each mini muffin cup in your pan.

1. Bake: Bake the cookies in the preheated oven for 8 minutes. Do not over bake the cookies, you want them a little underbaked for the best texture.
2. Add Peanut Butter Cups: When you have removed the mini muffin pan from the oven, immediately press one peanut butter cup into the center of each cookie. All the cookies to cool completely before removing from the pan to enjoy. 

Success Tips

These cookies are truly super easy to make, and almost fail-proof, but here are a few tips to help. 

• Don’t Wait: You need to add the peanut butter cups to the cookies as soon as they come out of the oven, otherwise, they won’t go in. 
• Spray the Pan: Even if your mini muffin pan is coated with non-stick material, you should still spray it well. There’s nothing worse than having your peanut butter cup cookies stuck in the muffin tin. 

My Favorite Cookie Making Tools

Having the right tools in the kitchen makes cooking and baking so much more fun. Here are the tools I use to make these cookies: 

• KitchenAid Hand Mixer: Kitchenaid makes some of the best small appliances. I love this mixer specifically because it has 9 different speeds. Unlike others that I’ve used, this one has the ability to mix things at a speed that is actually very low when I need it to!
• Wilton Muffin Pan: This mini muffin pan has 24 spaces, so I do this recipe in two batches. It’s non-stick and cleans up very easily which is a plus.
• Cookie Scoop: To get evenly sized cookies, I love using a cookie scoop. They come in different sizes, and for this recipe, I used the smaller, 1 tablespoon size.

Variations for Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

Feel free to change these cookies up a bit to suit your mood, or what you have already on hand. The Reese’s cup in the center of your peanut butter cup cookies can be replaced with another chocolate candy. Try these: 

• Mini Size Snickers or Milky Way bars (if you can’t find the square mini’s, pick up fun-sized bars and cut them in half).
• Hershey’s Nuggets or Miniatures.
• Any style of Hershey’s Kisses.
• Rolo’s.
• Mini Almond Butter Cups.
• White Chocolate or Dark Chocolate mini Reese’s Cups.
• Butterfinger Minis.
• Lindt Truffles.

Add a drizzle of chocolate or white chocolate on top to make these extra fancy!

FAQs

You are going to be making this delicious peanut butter cup cookie recipe all the time, now that you see how simple it is to get such a tasty result!