A good deed for me means cookies for you.

It's a proven fact; nothing says "Thank you for fixing my car for only the cost of parts" or, "Thank you for shoving a 7ft Christmas tree into my Dodge Neon" quite like cookies. Everyone loves cookies, especially this time of year when eating a ton of crap isn't only excused, it's encouraged. So started my Sunday night of baking in exchange for the many good deeds I have been on the receiving end of recently.

About a year or so ago, I scoured the Internet for an easy to make, but also easy to impress, vegan cookie recipe. Many of the ones I ran into had ingredients I don't tend to have in my house, or had a ton of complicated steps I just didn't feel like doing. That is until I found a blog called Mac and Cheese Review that had a recipe for something that sounded almost too good to be true: Vegan Peanut Butter Filled Chocolate Cookies.

Now anyone who knows me knows that I think peanut butter should be on EVERYTHING. It's a magical, wonderful food that my life would be severely lacking without. Mix that with chocolate, and forget about it. So I decided to give the cookies and shot.

I think I've made them at least 10 times since.

They are AMAZING! They are rich with just the right amount of sweet and just the right amount of peanut butter. They were easy to make (although a bit time consuming, but I'll explain why that's not so bad in a minute), most of the ingredients were already in my house, and people will hardly be able to believe they are vegan. I brought these to a party for the most recent election, and a guy there told me I "singlehandedly changed his mind on vegan baking". That's me, converting one nonbeliever at a time.

So without further ado, the recipe (which I adapted a bit from the original blog because of a portion issue)

You will need:
1 ½ cups flour
½ cup cocoa powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup margarine
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1/3 cup soy milk
½ cup powdered sugar
½ cup peanut butter
1/3 cup dark chocolate chips (try Bakers)
(Should yield about 12 2-inch cookies)

1. Preheat oven to 350º.
2. Mix flour, cocoa powder, and baking soda in a bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, cream together the margarine, sugar, and brown sugar. When combined, mix in the soy milk.
4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix.
5. In a separate bowl, mix together the powdered sugar and peanut butter. Once mixed, add the chocolate chips.
6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Take about a 2 or 3 tablespoons of the chocolate dough in your hand, and roll into a ball. Flatten the ball on the parchment paper to form a disk. Take a pinch or about 1 teaspoon of the peanut butter mixture and place in the center of the disk. Like so:

7. Fold the edges of the disk up and over the peanut butter, pressing the seams together. You will be left with a slightly misshapen ball that looks like this:

8. Gently flatten the ball with your palms to form it into a cookie shape, being careful not to split any of the seams. Clean up any of the edges you feel look unsightly. Then, place the cookie seam-side down on the parchment paper to bake, about 10-12 minutes.

Unless you are trying to really get these suckers made quick, the assembling process of the cookies should take about 30-45 minutes. But this is a Stoned Soup favorite for a reason. The work itself is pretty mindless, so before you start assembling, light a j, turn on some music, and just use the time to get lost in your own thoughts. I'm sure you don't take as much time every day as you should to just focus on what's going on in your head, so why not start now? And by the end of it, you'll have all these delicious cookies to eat on top of it.

-Nikki