I had a vision for a new cookie, peanut butter and jelly.
I’m not the first to think of this, but I have yet to find a recipe that
matches my vision: a ball of peanut butter cookie dough folded around a
glistening globe of jelly and baked to perfection. In my vision, the warm jelly
squirts out as you bite into the tender-crisp peanut butter cookie shell, not
unlike a jelly doughnut.
Early in the vision, I imagined putting jelly into plastic
containers and letting it set in the freezer, then using the small end of a
melon-baller to make little jelly dots. I planned to let them set firm and then
drop them into little cups formed of cookie dough. I reasoned that the cold
jelly would hold up while the cookie baked around it.
I Googled the concept a bit more. I found recipes that
spread jelly between two frozen rounds of cookie dough, and recipes the plopped
it into thumbprints pushed into peanut butter colored balls. The majority of
recipes suggested I simply bake peanut butter cookies and make jelly-filled
sandwiches out of them. I haven’t found anything like what I envisioned.
Have I mentioned my fantasy of winning the Pillsbury
Bake-Off one day? It’s a bucket list item, really. The biggest challenge to
date has been coming up with a completely original recipe – something that has
never been baked before. If my cookie idea works, it could be a contender.
(This goal drives many of my recipe experiments, and I’ve cooked some doozies.)
Jelly doesn’t freeze, however, which I did not know until
today. I had a suspicion yesterday when, after keeping two bowls of jelly (one
grape, one strawberry) in the freezer for two hours, I could scoop it with the
melon-baller as easily as if I had taken it straight from the newly bought jar.
I persevered, scooped little gems of jelly onto a parchment-papered cookie
sheet and slid them into the freezer to set firm. This morning, I expected to
find hard little marbles of jelly rolling around on the cookie sheet. Instead,
I found this:
 |
| After sixteen hours in my freezer, the jelly had merely spread. |
My perfect balls of jelly had actually spread over night. They jiggle just like jelly. They didn’t even
get frosty. I am sure there is a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for this,
but it complicates my vision. I’m not giving up, though, because if it works,
this might be the one -- the original recipe that wins me the million, and
fame, and glory. Submissions for the 2014 Pillsbury Bake-Off “Simple Sweets”
category begin April 4, 2014. Today’s baking will determine whether or not I
have a thirteenth contest to enter this year. Recipe writing counts, doesn’t
it?
