Caramel Peanut Butter Cookies Dipped in Cinnamon Sugar

So I made an oopsie and shared the rest of our Christmas cookies at our neighborhood potluck last night… which is fine except for the fact that my 5 year old reminded me that we now no longer have Christmas cookies to leave out for Santa. Darn it!! So here it is, absolutely, completely, insanely LAST MINUTE and I have to push out a few dozen more balls of deliciousness (because who can bake just a handful!?) – and I am in a crunch. To be totally honest, the inside of the grocery store makes me feel physically ill because I have literally been every single day for the past 2 weeks for something or another. Last minute juice boxes for the kid’s party. Someone left the milk out all night. No one will own up to who demolished all of the chips for the lunch boxes. Oh crap, we ran out of bread. You know… adult problems. So I was searching through my pantry looking for ingredients that I already have on hand that could be thrown together to bake something scrumptious… and that’s how these Caramel Peanut Butter Cookies Dipped in Cinnamon Sugar came to be. The original recipe called for a snickerdoodle cookie but nope, I didn’t have that. What I DID, however, have was Betty Crocker’s® peanut butter cookie mix! That means that this recipe was not only a SNAP to put together, but I discovered that peanut butter and caramel are like, long lost best friends. This cookie should be a thing!!! Once I’m through sharing it, it will be! 🙂

These are the 2 basic ingredients these cookies are based on:

Plus you’ll also need:

• Ingredients listed on back of peanut butter cookie mix (3 Tbsp vegetable oil, 1 Tbsp water, 1 egg)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

To start, combine the sugar and cinnamon to make a nice cinnamon sugar mixture. Also unwrap 12 Kraft® caramels and cut each one in half. Then prepare the cookie mix as instructed on the package.

Once you have a firm dough, separate into 24 balls. Each of those balls you will then split in half again. This recipe yields 24 cookies but you will split each cookie in half to add a caramel to the middle of it.

Once you have split a ball in half, roll each side into a ball again. Make a thumbprint in one side as a little hole to insert a half of a caramel piece that you have already prepared.

Then add the other ball on top and roll between your palms to combine back into one large ball.

Roll this dough ball that is now stuffed with a caramel into the cinnamon sugar mixture and set on a baking sheet. I chose to line mine with parchment paper. Bake at 350 degrees F for 11 minutes!

Enjoy warm out of the oven!! Ahhhhhhhh. Perfection!

These look like snickerdoodles so the peanut butter taste is a pleasant surprise at first bite. The cinnamon is a nice compliment to PB though and the caramel just oozes right out… There’s not a thing about this concoction that I would change!!

Give ’em a shot and let me know what you think!!

Happy Holidays, y’all!!!! <3