Cookies are the best…especially cookies with peanut butter and chocolate. Thus, these Peanut Butter Chocolate Pillows are basically a dream come true. I actually made these as soon as the recipe was posted last year, and they turned out a little weird. (Now I’m thinking it was because I used unsalted peanut butter.) Fortunately, I decided to give these a second chance, and they were amazing…like big puffy peanut butter cups. Unfortunately, all 24 of them were gone before I thought to take a picture, so we’ll have to settle with a photo of what was left of last year’s batch.

Classic "before" picture (referring to both baking and photography skills).

Last week’s batch looked just like the picture in the recipe, I swear. And it made exactly 24, since I split up both doughs into 24 pieces. It’s hard to calculate what the ingredients cost, but I’d estimate that it was around $6 total. At a bake sale or a neighborhood bakery, cookies this fancy might sell for $2 each, so I hypothetically saved $42 by not buying two dozen fresh-baked gourmet cookies elsewhere.

That bumps April’s savings up to $88—not bad at all. Perhaps spurred by recent events (they say the oil spill is nearly the size of Jamaica), I’ve decided to send the money to…

http://www.oceana.org/

Besides countering pollution, Oceana also protects marine wildlife and works against habitat destruction and climate change. These are all really bad things that you can read about on their website (except marine wildlife, which is a good thing), and I think they deserve a lot more than $88 to continue this work.