National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day - April 2nd

It's been a while since we've celebrated any national days. Today is National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day! Sounds like a good one to celebrate!

For dinner, we're having the very popular Smuckers Uncrustables. They're a tasty treat when you're on the go or when you're at home. Both the kids and I had them for dinner along with some other health foods.

Now we could have just left it at that, but I've got something else in mind.
Alton Brown is the host of Good Eats, and in it he displays his wacky sense of humor and a bit of the science behind cooking. I love it!
It was just a few days ago that Alton started a new series on Youtube, and in it one of his recipes was a peanut butter cookie. I think we can do something with that!
The kids and I sat down and watched it together, and they loved it. They were laughing at his weird antics, like throwing the jar of peanut butter, and they were excited to make peanut butter cookies with me.

First we assembled the ingredients. Pretty easy actually.
1 cup of smooth peanut butter, 1/2 a cup of white sugar, 1/2 a cup of brown sugar, 1 egg, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and 1/4 of kosher salt.

I measured out 1 cup of sticky peanut butter by weight. Ian added 120 grams of white sugar. It'll be more consistent than trying to measure a 1/2 cup of it.

And brown sugar is always difficult to measure because how much do you pack it? Alli duly measured us 120 grams of brown sugar too.

I know you can cream together sugar and butter. What about creaming together sugar and peanut butter? Ian is giving it a shot.

Now the kids are pretty good at cracking eggs, but I'm going to do this one myself. 1 egg, plus the rest of the ingredients. Ian lamented that we didn't try any of the batter before adding the egg, because  the peanut butter and sugar looked so good together.

Alli stirred up the everything together into a tasty cookie batter. Nice work Alli!

Next we used a disher to measure out even amounts of cookie dough onto a half sheet pan.

And you can't have a peanut butter cookie without that classic fork cross-hatch on the top. Thank you Alli.

While they're baking I brought the kids to the living room to watch the Peanut Butter Jelly Time video. I thought it was a funny song years ago when I heard it. The kids hated it, thinking the banana was annoying. Go figure with that.

Now we said today is Peanut Butter AND Jelly Day so we're not quite done with these yet. Grabbing some Strawberry Smuckers from the fridge (my favorite jelly) we're going to top off a few of these cookies.

Perfect! Let's go eat them!

Nice job kids! Great showing off those baking skills.

Thank you Alton Brown!

Mmm. Very tasty peanut butter and jelly cookies.

The cookies themselves were very light and also very sweet. They actually had a hard time holding together.
They were very delicious though. Alli and I liked the ones that had jelly on top. Ian preferred them without jelly on top. But either way, both kids gave them a thumbs up.