Peanut Butter Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What are the basic ingredients for peanut butter cookies? ›

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

My cookies came out dry and crumbly. What did I do wrong? Possible reasons include over-baking, improper peanut butter consistency, using a smaller egg, or inaccurate ingredient measurements. To avoid this issue, monitor baking time, mix natural peanut butter well, use a large egg, and measure ingredients accurately.

Use more granulated sugar than brown sugar.

With all of the peanut butter in this cookie dough, however, too much brown sugar made the cookies so soft that they fell apart.

If you're wanting to use natural (no sugar added) peanut butter, the cookies will be less sweet and they will likely spread out more. Using natural peanut butter will change the structure and texture of the cookies. Why are my cookies dry and crumbly? This is most likely a classic case of using too much flour.

One reason could be that you overcooked them. Another reason could be that you didn't add enough moisture to the dough. Finally, your peanut butter cookies might be dry and crumbly if you used a natural peanut butter that doesn't have any added oil.

Feel free to add chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, Reeses pieces, chopped chocolate, or even chopped up Nutter Butters. I would recommend skipping the fork tines if you add any of these ingredients. Why did my peanut butter cookies turn out hard? This is most likely to happen from over-baking your cookies.

Two, your expectations for a peanut taste are too high. The cookies have lots of other ingredients including a significant amount of flavor that decrease the flavor of the peanut butter. You might find a peanut butter flavor extract somewhere…. Adding whole or chopped peanuts could help too.

I was shocked to discover that these peanut butter cookies were flourless. But if you think about it in terms of baking theory and pastry techniques, it makes sense—peanut butter contains so much fat that it doesn't really need that much flour for structure and gluten.

If you don't flatten the cookies first, then the fork does double duty – it performs both functions. One very subtle result of creating the pattern is that the little tips of dough bake up crisper than the rest of the cookie, giving you both a bit of additional texture and deeper taste where the dough is more baked.

Should you refrigerate peanut butter cookie dough before baking? ›

Nut butter cookie dough tends to be quite soft. If you want less spread in the cookies, it's best to chill it for at least an hour, and you can leave it in the fridge overnight if you want to make it ahead. If you don't mind your cookies spreading a bit, you can skip this step.

So it looks like that there are utilitarian reasons for the cross-hatching—to allow for even cooking—but it might have been passed along for nearly a hundred years for primarily aesthetic reasons, where the cross-hatching is more to identify the cookies as peanut butter ones, rather than to cook them well.

"When your dough is refrigerated, the butter hardens. So when you bake them, they spread less and hold their shape better," adds Epperson. "Which means a better likelihood of a soft, chewy cookie in the center."

While there may be countless variations, each cookie at the core has four ingredients – butter, sugar, flour & eggs. The proportions of ingredients and the methods of mixing are what define our cookies. Dough spreads – Inside the hot oven, the butter starts to melt and the dough gradually starts to spread out.

Group #1: Basic Ingredients

Cookies contain four basic ingredients: fat, eggs, sugar, and flour. Each cookie recipe is simply a variation of these four. Some cookie recipes have different amounts of each of these ingredients. Some incorporate one or more of the ingredients differently into the cookie dough.

Cookie ratios vary depending on the desired texture. A basic cookie dough follows a 1-2-3 proportion of sugar, fat, and flour.

Cook's Illustrated recommends baking peanut butter cookies with products from traditionally creamy brands like, you guessed it, Skippy or Jif. Such butters have smooth, consistent textures that easily combine with any cookie dough.