Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich Cookies

By Kevin Williams

I had not baked in awhile with Aster and Bea so yesterday when I had a window of time at home with them to do it, I took advantage of it.  I shouted into the living room: "Who wants to help me bake?"  And both girls replied "me!" and they both came scampering into the kitchen.  Aster, age 5, gathered the ingredients as I read them off and Bea, well, Bea just want to get into everything.  Baking with a 2 and a 5 year-old has one universal ingredient: a cup or two or three of patience.  Without that, yeah, you'll get nowhere.  So while Aster gathered the ingredients, I gathered the patience and what we ended up with was a wonderful, tasty sandwich cookie.  Man, I am a choco-o-holic, but this cookie is a sweet alternative that makes one forget about chocolate.  Just good, good stuff.   Basically, you have two peanut butter cookies with a layer of jelly between them.  And they taste amazing.  The cookies are nice and soft so the dessert shares well. I could the sandwich cookies into quarters and letting Bea try a quarter was plenty.

Bea, age 2, gets in on the stirring..

Bea and Aster work together...

Amazing delicious!

The original recipe called for rolling the balls of dough in white sugar before baking. I skipped that step and they were still plenty amazing.  For an extra Amish touch, I used Beachy's Bulk Foods (Arthur, Ill) homemade blueberry jelly for the filling.  But you can use any.

This is just a good, good recipe that came to me from an Amish woman in Ohio.  You could dress these up even more for the holidays, I imagine, by putting something edible green and red on the outside. I don't know. I'll leave that for creative Pinteresters.