Cookie Carnival: Sweet Banana Peanut Butter Cookies

OH MY.  Wow.  Hello soft cookie goodness.  What a wonderful recipe to bake up for my first foray back to Cookie Carnival.  I was shocked to discover that my last Cookie Carnival post was back in December 2009 (oh those pecan pie cookies!) -- time has just flown by!  Every month, I received the Cookie Carnival emails and loved reading about the baking adventures of my fellow bakers (check out the most recent roundups posted by Tami, our lovely Cookie Carnival hostess).  And now I'm excited to start baking again!  I just finished one job and am in the midst of a month of catching-up-on-my-life before I begin my next job.  Also, today is my husband's first day back at school and surely, a batch of cookies will help to appease a bunch of high schoolers?

So, August's Cookie Carnival brought us SWEET BANANA PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES from Canada's Food Network chef, Anna Olson.  (Check out our round up of cookies here) Or, perhaps better renamed as, Elvis's dream cookies.  Or as decadent sandwiches of savory and sweet.  I was very pleasantly surprised by these cookies.  From the photo on the Food Network website, I thought that the cookies would be crunchy -- like a typical "sandwich" cookie.  The cookies, however, were delightfully soft -- not only fresh from the oven, but hours later as well.  The filling -- made of cream cheese, peanut butter, and bananas (softened slightly in a butter-sugar-cinnamon melted mixture) -- was not overly sweet and a very nice complement to the peanut butter cookies.

In the first batch, I made the cookies at the suggested tablespoon measurement.  These resulted in cookies larger than I expected.  For the next batches, I shrunk the cookies down a bit, to fit 16 on a tray instead of 12, baked them for about 7 minutes, to yield a larger number of cookies.  The smaller cookies turned out as equally soft and delicious as the larger cookies.  Plus, the combination of two cookies plus the filling is quite rich, so for me, personally, the smaller cookies were perfect.  Also, these cookies are fantastic by themselves -- I definitely plan to make them again both with and without the filling!

RECIPE:

Ingredients

Cookie

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup peanut butter (smooth or crunchy)
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Filling

• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 1/2 tablespoons golden brown sugar
• 1/2 tablespoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon rum
• pinch cinnamon
• 2 bananas, sliced
• 1/2 cup cream cheese
• 1/2 cup smooth peanut butter

Directions

To Assemble

1. For cookies, preheat oven to 350° F. Cream together butter and sugars until pale and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla. Stir in peanut butter. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt. Add to peanut butter mixture and blend in. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet and crisscross mark them with a floured fork. Bake for 9 to 11 minutes, until cookies just start to colour around the edges.
2. For filling, in sauté pan, melt butter over medium heat. Add sugars and increase heat to medium-high. Stir until melted and bubbling. Add rum (watch out for flames). Add cinnamon. Stir in bananas to coat, set aside.
3. Cream together cream cheese and peanut butter until smooth. Mash bananas and add to cream cheese mixture until smooth. Chill for 20 minutes.
4. Fill between 2 peanut butter cookies to make sandwiches. Repeat with remaining cookies.
5. Yield: 12 sandwich cookies. (P.S. My version yielded 22 sandwich cookies -- a mix of the larger size and the smaller size)