3-in-1 Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What are the ingredients for peanut butter cookies? ›

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

If you overmix the dough, the cookies will be dry and crumbly. The best way to fix this is to add more liquid to the dough. This can be done by adding milk, water, or even melted butter. You may also need to add more flour to the dough if it is too wet.

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.

Made with just peanut butter, sugar, and an egg, these cookies are a breeze to whip up, requiring minimal effort and time (under 30 minutes!). Plus, with such basic pantry staples, there's a good chance you have everything you need in your kitchen to make them right now!

Peanut Butter: It's best to use a processed peanut butter like Jif creamy or Skippy creamy. I do not suggest using natural style, oily peanut butter. Crunchy peanut butter adds peanut chunks as well as a more crumbly texture.

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.

Using too much baking soda or baking powder can really mess up a recipe, causing it to rise uncontrollably and taste terrible.

The dough is extremely soft due to the creamy peanut butter, eggs, and butter and if it's not cold going into the oven, the cookies will spread all over your baking sheet. I chilled this cookie dough for 24 hours and my cookies were soft, thick perfection. I recommend chilling the dough for at least 3 hours.

Why You Need to Chill Your Cookie Dough. For starters, chilling prevents cookies from spreading out too quickly once they're in the oven. If you use a higher fat butter (like Kerrygold), chilling your dough is absolutely essential. Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool.

We prefer natural peanut butter here, so you can dial in the sugar and salt amounts precisely, and smooth peanut butter over crunchy to better control the cookies' fat and moisture levels. Letting the cookie dough rest ensures the flour is fully hydrated, resulting in crisper edges and chewier middles.

Why do you refrigerate peanut butter cookie dough? ›

"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." Chilling the dough creates fluffier cookies with better consistency.

Butter will make your cookies taste buttery; shortening will make them taste suspiciously vacant, like Katy Perry's voice post-autotune. Yes, shortening yields chewier cookies than butter does, because butter contains water and shortening doesn't.

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.

If you opt for all cake flour cookies, less gluten is formed when you mix the cookie dough. The resulting cookie consistency post-baking is delicate, softer, fluffier, and, well, more cake-like. The color may end up paler, and the edges might not be as crispy. But the flavor should still deliver.

THE THREE MAIN INGREDIENTS present in nearly every type of cookie are wheat flour, sugar, and fat, but you'll see other ingredients such as leaveners, eggs, liquids, such as milk, perhaps some chocolate, coconut, spices or nuts.

Ingredients: Peanut butter (peanuts, sugar, hydrogenated palm oil, salt), sugar, enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, vitamin B1 [thiamin mononitrate], vitamin B2 [riboflavin], folic acid), vegetable oil (palm kernel, palm and soybean oil), cocoa, contains 2% or less of invert sugar, cornstarch, salt, ...

That's why some of our cookies look the same but have two different names. Whether the package says Peanut Butter Patties® or Tagalongs®, or Samoas® or Caramel deLites®, the cookies are similarly delicious.