No bake Christmas Cookies—less than 10 minutes! Chocolate covered peanut butter Ritz cookies

My kiddo and I have been baking cookies for the grandparents every year since she was 5 years old. She absolutely loves it because every year we try to make a new kind of cookie BUT we also make one cookie recipe each year because it’s just soooo yummy and super easy to make!! It’s our Chocolate covered peanut butter Ritz cookies!! And now is a perfect time to make these since we got those $1/2 and B2G1 free Nabisco coupons and can pair it with the $1.88 Ritz sale at Kmart this week (or PM @ Wally’s)…making them only 92¢ a box wyb 3!!

Ingredients/Utensils:

1 16 oz box Ritz crackers

1 jar of your favorite creamy peanut butter

1 package (24 oz) melting chocolate ( I use Plymouth Pantry but you can use Wilton or your favorite brand)

1 bowl

1 spoon

1 butter knife or piping bag

wax paper

cookie sheet

 

Directions:

1. Cut off enough wax paper to place over your cookie sheet
2. Lay out 1 pkg of Ritz crackers on your cookie sheet (there should be 4 pkgs of ritz crackers per box)
3. Spread peanut butter on every other cracker with a butter knife or place the peanut butter in a piping bag or freezer/storage bag and pipe out the peanut butter on the cracker (great way to do a lot of cookies at once)
4. Take the crackers that don’t have peanut butter and place them over the ones that do and set cookie sheet aside for now
5. Break off a column of chocolate (3 squares) and place it in a microwaveable bowl
6. Place it in the microwave for 60 seconds and stir with spoon. If the chocolate is not completely melted, continue to heat in the microwave in 15 second intervals and stir each time. Continue to do so until completely melted
7. Take your cookie sheet full of peanut butter Ritz cracker cookies and place it next to your dipping chocolate bowl
8. Take one cookie and drop it into your chocolate and cover it completely (use spoon) like so:

(sorry, I know it just looks like a bowl of melted chocolate, but there is a cookie in there! LOL)

     9. Using your spoon or fingers (wash those hands hehe) take the cookie out and let the excess chocolate drip down. Then place back on your cookie sheet.

     10. At this point, you can add toppings to your cookies if you’d like. I like to add peanuts or almonds. Prior years I’ve purchased white/green/red melting chocolate as well and have drizzled that over the top…they come out looking very pretty and festive for the holiday 🙂 My daughter likes to use colorful sprinkles too…the choices are endless!

     11. Repeat steps 7-10 until all your cookies are done and then place the cookie sheet in the fridge for about 5 minutes to allow the chocolate to harden

     12. Take out of the fridge and take the cookies off the waxed paper, one at a time. If there’s some excess chocolate on the sides of the cookie, just trim it off with a butter knife or pull it off with your fingers (this is how we do it lol). Then place your cookies in a cute Christmas cookie tin to give as a gift or enjoy them right away with the kiddos!

Here’s our first batch (bad pic taken from my cell phone)

We added almonds on top of some but I also bought white chocolate so I plan

to drizzle some of that on our second batch 🙂

Remember that there are so many ways to dress these simple cookies up!

You can dip them in green/red melting chocolate (found at Michaels or any cake supply store) and

drizzle them with white/milk chocolate. You can also add sprinkles, nuts, coconut flakes….

Hope you enjoy these as much as we do!!!