This is another heirloom recipe from my mom’s collection, attributed to my Aunt Joyce Fearheiley. It’s the classic peanut butter cookie with a Hershey’s kiss on top. I took these to my office and they disappeared very quickly, and for good reason! It’s hard to disappoint people with milk chocolate and peanut butter.

The recipe itself is pretty easy to follow, though I did need to fill in some gaps in the instructions from Aunt Joyce’s index card. (That’s pretty typical for a lot of hand-written recipe cards.) The cookie base is a little dry, if I’m entirely honest. I experimented with baking the last few cookies for a minute less, though they had a line of moisture under the kisses, so the full baking time is probably best. It might be interesting to try these again with more moisture in the dough, either in the butter, peanut butter, or milk, to see if that makes a moister cookie.

Depending on how large you roll out the dough into balls, you can get 2-3 dozen. I used a 1.25″ cookie scoop to get an even size, and this made 27.5 cookies. My aunt said to roll 1 tsp. of dough at a time, which would make a lot of tinier cookies. If you can eyeball 1 inch, you should be able to get 3 dozen no problem.

1 3/4 c. flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 salt
1/2 c. butter
1/2 c. peanut butter
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tbsp. milk
1/2 c. granulated sugar
Hershey’s kisses

Whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt, then set aside.

Cream the butter and peanut butter together, then add the brown sugar and mix until combined. Then add the egg and vanilla.

Add the dry ingredients (minus the granulated sugar). Mix until everything is combined.

Preheat the oven to 375F.

Add the granulated sugar to a bowl. Roll dough into balls and then roll in sugar. Press down lightly on the surface of each ball.

Bake for 10 minutes, then take out of the oven and add a Hershey’s kiss in the center of each cookie. Bake for another 2 minutes.

Let cool completely before you try to move them. The cookie part will cool a lot faster than the kisses, which will hold their shape up until the moment you accidentally knock it on its side, and then you have a chocolatey mess.