Christmas Cookies, Milk and Rehab

I come from a family of bakers. And cookers. And eaters. If you don't know the difference between bakers and cookers, then clearly you are neither and I will shed some light on it for you. Baking requires measuring spoons and cups and with cooking these things are optional. I prefer to use my palm when measuring for cooking, but find Kareem's palms are best when baking. Do you understand now? I'm a born teacher. I teach people. Your life is better because of me. You are so lucky.

One of our favorite secret family recipes is a cookie recipe that we made every year for Christmas growing up. It's so good it's evil*. I'm not kidding. It's one of the seven deadly sins. Making it and eating it. I guess that makes it two of the seven deadly sins. It's that evil. A few years ago we discovered that you could freeze these cookies. I believe that my mom did it in a vain attempt to get everyone to stop eating them before Christmas. Turns out, they are even more awesome frozen, and we ate them even faster.

As I sat down to blog tonight, I thought, "What should I write about?" Actually I didn't think that at all. I just sort of decided to share our secret family recipe with the internet because no home should be without the most awesome cookie ever created at Christmas and also calling it a secret family recipe might have been a bit misleading since it's not a secret at all. Plus, it's not so much a family recipe as much as a recipe my mom found in a children's magazine when she was a kid.

Without further ado:

Peanut Butter Creams

I wish I could find a way to make this font all pretty and swirly.

These cookies really deserve a swirly pretty font for their name.

Ingredients: 1 1/3 cups of creamy peanut butter

1 14oz can of sweetened condensed milk

1 bag of chocolate chips (you can use mini-chocolate chips but I prefer the regular)

powdered sugar (also known as confectionary sugar, same sweet white powder1 just two names, like Ricky Bobby)

1It is important to note that although I refered to powdered sugar as "sweet white powder," I in no way am condoning adding cocaine to your cookies, but if you do let me know how that works out.

Do not, I repeat DO NOT preheat the oven. These are no-bake cookies.

All right, we are ready to mix our ingredients. First, carefully and cautiously combine the first three ingredients in an appropriate sized bowl. Obviously, by carefully and cautiously, I mean dump them into the bowl.

Stir.

Pour some confectionary sugar into the mix. Maybe, like, half a cup. I don't know. Eyeball it. Ask Kareem if it looks good. He's got a pretty good eye for these things.

Stir.

Continue adding the sugar until your dough takes on the consistency desired (The consistency desired: It is no longer sticky, yet still holds together if you should, say, try to roll it into 1  inch balls).

Separate the dough into 1 inch segments and roll it into 1 inch balls. Set the said balls on wax paper to dry.

And there you have it, the not-so-secret recipe that has fattened up my family for generations. I shared it with you because I love you, which is also why I'm strongly suggesting that you never make this cookie. It's highly addictive (even without the cocaine). You might find that once you've consumed these cookies you no longer care about things like housework, personal hygiene, your children or your spouse. Only the cookie will matter.  Before you know it, you'll find yourself down at your local gas station at 3 am purchasing milk. (Did I not mention that these cookies are extremely sweet and require that you have a gallon of milk on hand at all times?)

Please disregard this recipe or you might end up on a plane to rehab in Arizona wondering where it all went wrong. It's only because I care.

*The cookie has informed me that if you don't forward this recipe to twenty of your closest friends in the next 24 hours it will come after you and your loved ones. I recommend you take the cookie seriously. Unfortunately, Kareem did not.