Peanut Butter Shortbread Sandwich Cookies

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Add the egg and sugar to a bowl and beat together using a stand or hand mixer. Add in the butter, peanut butter and vanilla and continue beating until incorporated.

In a separate bowl sift together the flour, crushed peanuts and salt then add it into the egg mixture. Note that, if you’re using a hand mixer, you may find it easier to incorporate the flour by hand with a spoon since the dough will be thick. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 20 minutes while you make the filling.

Make the filling by beating together the cream cheese, whipped topping, sugar, peanut butter, vanilla and salt in a medium sized bowl. If the mixture seems too thick to spread, you can add the milk to thin it out.

Remove dough from the refrigerator. If you’re just making round cookies, scoop out about an ounce of dough, place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and flatten out each scoop with the palm of your hand. If you’d like to make cut out cookies, roll the dough out on the parchment paper lined tray, to your desired thickness. Then cut with your favorite cutter but leave the cookie in place and simply peel the extra dough away from the sides. You can keep the cookies pretty close together because this dough will not spread. Re-roll the scraps of dough to make additional cookies.

Bake for approximately 12 minutes. When done, the cookie edges will only be barely browned and the cookie itself will still be soft. Remove from the oven and let cookies rest on the baking sheet for a few minutes until the cookies harden a bit. Then transfer them to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Once cooled, place a heaping teaspoon of filling between two cookies and sandwich them together. Refrigerate leftovers.

Using a 3″ cutter I got 24 cookies which made a dozen sandwiched cookies.