Additions and Substitutions. Sprinkle some chopped nuts (walnuts, pistachios, or peanuts are great here), sprinkles, or flakey sea salt over the tops of these cookies while the chocolate is still wet for extra texture. If you’re short on time, stir the chocolate chips directly into the cookie dough instead of melting and drizzling the chocolate after the cookies are baked.

Use a kitchen scale! Measuring dry ingredients by volume (with cups) is notoriously unreliable; for perfect-every-time measurements, use a kitchen scale to measure by weight and follow the gram measurements in the recipe above. If you don't have a scale, be sure to measure your flour with the scoop and level method for best results. 

Let the egg come to room temperature for 30 minutes to an hour on the counter if you have the time - it will incorporate more smoothly into the batter if it isn't right-out-of-the-fridge cold. (If you don’t have time to add this step, no worries!)

What size cookie scoop should I use? We used a 3-Tablespoon cookie scoop to portion the dough in these photos, which yields about 14 cookies, each 3" or so in diameter. We also tested this recipe with a 1-Tablespoon cookie scoop, which yields 40ish cookies each about 1.5" in diameter (for a 1T scoop, we reduced the bake time to 8 minutes). If you use a different sized cookie scoop, you'll likely need to adjust the bake time: Keep an eye on the cookies as they bake and watch for those telltale surface cracks and brown edges to form!

What type of chocolate should I use? We prefer a bittersweet, semi-sweet, or dark chocolate for this recipe. We used Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips in the photos above; we also recommend their baking chocolate bars. Use a high quality chocolate if you can: it will melt more smoothly, and will have a nicer finish once it sets.

We prefer to use smooth or creamy peanut butter here because it mixes into the batter so smoothly, but you can use chunky peanut butter if you want to!

Optional: Chill the cookie dough. Mix the dough as directed, then pop it in the fridge (uncovered is fine) for 30 minutes before scooping and baking the cookies. This quick chill lets the butter set a bit so that it melts more slowly in the oven, giving you a chewier cookie with lighter color. 

This cookie recipe was developed to spread out into a relatively thin, flat cookie (as opposed to many traditional peanut butter cookies, which are quite fluffy and need to be pressed down with a fork before baking because they don’t spread very much). We did it this way to simplify the baking process and create a better canvas for the chocolate drizzle!