Reese's Fudge Cookie

These are chocolate cookies built specifically around Reese’s peanut butter cups. A deeply cocoa-rich dough (¾ cup of cocoa powder makes these seriously dark) gets studded with chopped peanut butter cups that half-melt during the short bake, creating gooey, salty-sweet peanut butter pockets scattered through a fudgy cookie.

The butter-to-sugar ratio here is generous, and combined with cocoa instead of melted chocolate, the result is a cookie that’s somewhere between a brownie and a traditional drop cookie: fudgy and dense in the center with a slightly crackled top.

Eight to 9 minutes is all these need. Pull them when the tops just barely look set. They’ll firm up on the cooling rack, and overbaking turns the fudgy center into a dry, crumbly hockey puck.

Pro Tips

• Chop the peanut butter cups into rough pieces before stirring into the dough. Whole cups are too large for a teaspoon-sized cookie
• Don’t overbake. These should look slightly underdone when you pull them. The residual heat finishes the job on the rack
• Use unsweetened cocoa powder, not sweetened hot cocoa mix. The dough already has plenty of sugar
• Let the cookies cool on the sheet for 2 minutes before transferring to prevent them from breaking apart

Variations

• Use Reese’s Pieces candy instead of peanut butter cups for a different peanut butter texture throughout
• Add a sprinkle of flaky sea salt on top of each cookie right after baking
• Swap peanut butter cups for chopped Snickers or Butterfinger bars