Peanut Butter and Jelly Jewels

These are tender, sandy - not to be confused with dry - melt-in-your-mouth peanut butter thumbprints with a fruit preserve or chocolate ganache filling.

The recipe has just a few ingredients, with a lower than usual proportion of flour to peanut butter/butter ratio, that come together quickly in either a food processor or electric mixer; I used the latter to avoid over mixing. The completed dough is refrigerated, shaped and baked.

My first batch spread quite a bit so I refrigerated the remaining shaped cookies for several hours on cookie sheets before baking; the result was the same.....

Once cooled, half the cookies were filled with the chocolate mixture (melted chocolate and butter that takes less than a minute to make in the microwave and tastes out-of-this world delicious!), and the remainder with sour cherry jam.

The chocolate-filled cookies were a huge hit as the filling balanced nicely with the intense peanutty flavour of the cookie. The jam-filled ones were less successful.....perhaps a more intensely flavoured jam like raspberry would be a better choice.