Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies

This PB&J cookie will take you back to your childhood lunch box favorite. Creamy peanut butter and sweet raspberry jam combine in a pillowy soft cookie that is the perfect balance of sweet and salty. Enjoy with a glass of milk to evoke grade school nostalgia.

It blows my mind like dynamite that it’s been over a decade since I picked up my son from preschool. Today he’s getting ready to start high school, yet it seems like yesterday that I was strapping him in his car seat for the ride home from daycare. He’d be in the back jamming out to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” while his little face was smeared with jam leftover from his peanut butter and jelly lunch.

My son is a creature of habit so this happened every day like clockwork. Every. Freaking. Day. I’m dead serious: same song, same sandwich, same jelly smeared face. I didn’t realize how out of control it had gotten until one of the other mothers asked me what was wrong with my kid. Under normal circumstances I would’ve taken all kinds of offense (and taken off her head), but I was thrown off guard by the fact that she whispered it with a grave concern for his wellbeing.

What the ever-loving hell was going on?

If there was something seriously wrong with my son, the inquisitive mother needed to spit it out ASAP. You don’t beat around the bush over something like this, you screw the other person’s feelings and blurt it out.

She hesitated to soften the blow. I prepared myself for the hit. I could take it, I told myself. Anything was better than the torture of not knowing. That’s why no matter what came out of her mouth, I vowed to stay calm, cool and collected.

It turns out I lied.

After hearing what she had to say, I did not maintain my composure. What I did instead was bust out in laughing hysterics. Why? Because every time the mother saw my son with red smeared across his mouth like the Joker she just assumed he’d been stricken with an incurable disease.

Now you get the giggly reaction. My preschooler didn’t have some rare syndrome; he had raspberry jelly-itis. The cause was his daily PB&J. I know because I diagnosed him myself. And he’s still afflicted with the ailment to this day.

I’m not kidding.

He’s now a 9th grader and ever since I can remember he’s only ever eaten two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school lunch. That’s 2 years of preschool, 1 year of VPK, 6 years of elementary and 3 years of middle school. I needed a NASA engineered calculator to figure out how many sandwiches that was. Here’s what I came up with: 180 days of school per year x 12 years x 2 PB&Js per day = 4,320 sandwiches. It seemed so improbable that I checked the math twice. Then I checked it again. The result was always the same: over four thousand peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!

That’s just nuts.

If that taught me anything about my kid it’s that he knows what he likes. And since peanut butter and jelly is his favorite sandwich combo, I knew he’d go crazy for them in a cookie. How could he not? Peanut butter and jelly thumbprints are the perfect marriage of sweet and salty. Plus the cookies are small enough to shove in your pie hole and eat in a single, melt-in-your-mouth bite.

One taste of these soft cookies and you’ll be hooked. It doesn’t get simpler than this 10 ingredient recipe, but if you feel like kicking them up a notch go for it. A dusting of powdered sugar, finely crushed peanuts or drizzled white chocolate are perfect toppings for these thumbprints.