Copycat Levain Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie
Levain Bakery is one of the rare hyped bakeries that truly has no haters. Their cookies are too good, their love for baking too apparent. To love Levain’s thick chunky cookies is to be human, to bake them, divine.
Rich and thick and packed with peanut butter chips, these dark chocolate peanut butter cookies are so good you might need to quadruple this recipe, but we’ll start with one egg for now.
Keep a close eye on these while they’re baking, it’s very easy to misjudge the doneness of dark/chocolate dough, and we want these to stay a little fudge-y in the middle.
Ingredients:
- 1 cup AP flour
- 2 Tbsp cornstarch
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp salt
- ⅓ cup cocoa powder
- ½ cup butter, unsalted and softened
- ½ cup brown sugar
- 1 egg, large
- ⅔ 10-oz bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Chips
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Sift together flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cocoa powder together, and set aside.
Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy, at least two minutes.
Add egg, and mix thoroughly.
Add flour/cocoa powder mixture ⅓ at a time, mixing until just combined.
Fold peanut butter chips into batter.
Portion batter into 4 ~6-ounce balls of dough.
Bake for 7-9 minutes, or until the tops are just about to/beginning to set.
Remove and let cool for at least 10 minutes.
Tips:
- Reese’s peanut butter chips are my personal favorite, but since they’re not an item carried by every store, use whatever peanut butter chips you can find.
- For craggy tops, split dough balls in half and stick back together, rough sides out.
- Cornstarch helps these cookies retain their iconic thick, domed shape.
- These cookies freeze beautifully, not that you’ll have any leftovers.
Variations:
- The dark chocolate cookie is a great base for any number of flavors, peppermint chip, white chocolate chip, chocolate lover’s, etc.
- For an extra intense chocolate flavor, add 1 tsp instant coffee to your egg/butter/sugar mixture in step 4.
- Although I think the cookies most closely resemble Levain’s with ⅔ a bag of chips, I won’t tell anyone if you decide to add the whole bag.
- For smaller cookies, split dough into 8 balls and bake for 5-7 minutes.
Levain Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie
Ingredients
- 1 cup AP flour
- 2 tbsp cornstarch
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp salt
- ⅓ cup cocoa powder
- ½ cup butter unsalted and softened
- ½ cup brown sugar
- 1 egg large
- ⅔ 10-oz bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Chips
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400°F.
- Sift together flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cocoa powder together, and set aside.
- Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy, at least two minutes.
- Add egg, and mix thoroughly.
- Add flour/cocoa powder mixture ⅓ at a time, mixing until just combined.
- Fold peanut butter chips into batter.
- Portion batter into 4 ~6-ounce balls of dough.
- Bake for 7-9 minutes, or until the tops are just about to/beginning to set.
- Remove and let cool for at least 10 minutes.
