Happy Birthday / Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe!

The amount of daylight is extending. Add to that Daylight Savings time. It's dark as late as 7:15pm here in Western Pennsylvania! Also, hens lay more eggs as the amount of daylight increases. So yay for increased egg production!

As we celebrate more daylight and evenings with more daylight, we also celebrate Homestead Phil's birthday! We also celebrate Givi's birthday on Homestead Phil's birthday too. When we adopted her July 31, 2011, we were told that she was likely born in March. It only made sense to assign her birthday to Phil's! Although Givi will pick Phil's lap every time if we are sitting on the couch together, she mainly sleeps on me at night. He doesn't allow her on his desk but I do. Or rather I tolerate it and he does not! haha Sometimes I think I have two monitors on my desk so she can sit in front of one of them and I can work on the other! From my desk, she does tend to go on a walk about across my chest and around my shoulder onto the back of my chair and back down again.

Homestead Phil is not a big sweet eater - I married him anyway! :) His favorite sweet is Peanut Butter Cookies so this year, I made them for his birthday. I knew I needed 20 to spell out "Happy Birthday Phillip" but, not all 20 would fit on the plate so this is what I came up with:

I'm not exactly sure where this Peanut Butter Cookie recipe came from but I would guess that it came from either my mom or my Gramma (my mom's mom).
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten (I recommend fresh eggs of course!)
1 cup peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
2 1/2 cup flour

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, peanut butter, and vanilla. Sift flour and baking soda together. (I never sift anything!) Add flour / baking soda mixture to peanut butter mixture. Mix well. The instructions then say to roll into balls. I use a tablespoon Medium Scoop from Pampered Chef and drop them onto the a Silpat silicone baking mat. Then press down with a fork to make those fun tracks on the top! Bake at 375 for 10 minutes.

I made a full batch when I could have made a half batch as all I really needed was 20 cookies! I baked the rest the next day after refrigerating the dough for a day. Homestead Phil did not complain! Well about the cookies. He complained about the weather that it was snowing on his birthday in March. I hope we're done seeing snow for awhile! C'mon Spring!