Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies (aka Magic Middles)

Author Notes

Ask the internet about magic middles and you’ll be told they are a Keebler product, all the rage in the ’90s, but since discontinued. In 2012, Serious Eats’ Stella Parks brought them back to life when she whipped up her own version—a sugar cookie with a chocolate belly—calling long-lost magic middles America's Most Wanted Cookie (you know, in a good way).

For what it’s worth, this was the most-wanted cookie in my family when my brother and I were growing up. The only catch is that “magic middles,” to us, means a totally different thing.

Instead of a vanilla-outside and chocolate-inside, our version has a chocolate-outside and peanut butter–inside. My mom says she scored the recipe from another mom at a school bake sale a few years pre-millenium, but…did she?

When I started digging into this almost two years ago for an article, the closest lookalike I could find was in King Arthur’s The Cookie Companion, which was published not in the ’80s or ’90s, but in 2004 (hat tip to King Arthur’s Baker’s Hotline for the detective work). Which means that either my mom and I are confusing timing, or the recipe we got preceded the book—but then, where did it come from?

When I wrote about my conundrum last year, our community hopped right in with clues:

“I looked in Google Books and found a recipe from a 1991 Beta Sigma Chi cookbook for “Magic Peanut Butter Middles,’” Jenne wrote. “Looks like Keebler Magic Middles were introduced in 1989, so my guess is that it started as a copycat recipe—there was also a version called ‘Peanut Butter Filled’ that looks pretty much exactly like these.”

“The recipe appeared in my newspaper coupons, with coupons for Pillsbury flour, Skippy peanut butter and Mazola margarine,” J.K. added. “There is no salt in the recipe. The earliest expiration on the coupons is January 19, 1991.”

According to Steffany: “My mom came across the recipe and asked me to bake these one Christmas, it would have been right around 1989 or 1990. She loved them so much I've made them for her every Christmas since, almost 30 years now.”

“I've been making these since about that time as well—the recipe was printed in a lot of community/church fundraising cookbooks,” Brenda replied. “I still have one or two! No attribution there other than the woman who shared it.”

Add all this up and you’ve got this: an influx of not-Keebler magic middles sometime in the early ’90s, and a bunch of families who can’t stop craving them to this day.

Of course, I couldn’t help but put my own spin on my mom’s index card–documented, cocoa powder–stained recipe. I swapped out the sweetened peanut butter with unsweetened (this means you can sub in any nutty/seedy cousin, from cashew to sesame); bumped up the salt; decreased the flour for a fudgier vibe; and increased the cookie-smush so they turn out extra-slim.

You should know that these are a project, and a messy one at that. But messy in a satisfying way, a way that reminds you that you baked something good. You should also know they freeze perfectly—if there’s a better late-night snack, I need not know it. —Emma Laperruque

Test Kitchen Notes

Featured in: Food52's Holiday Cookie Chronicles —The Editors