Peanut Butter Cookies | Grandma's Best Dairy-Free Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why are my 3 ingredient peanut butter cookies falling apart? ›

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.

When making chocolate chip cookies, I always prefer to use more brown sugar than white sugar because that ratio produces a softer cookie. With all of the peanut butter in this cookie dough, however, too much brown sugar made the cookies so soft that they fell apart.

Easy Add-Ins: After creating the dough according to the peanut butter cookie mix instructions, try introducing 1 cup of add-ins like REESE'S PIECES, toffee bits, dried fruits, mini marshmallows or even cooked bacon bits, if you're feeling adventurous!

If your peanut butter cookies are hard, you likely cooked them for too long. They should not be baked for more than 8 or 9 minutes.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

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.

Should you refrigerate peanut butter cookie dough before baking? Optional! This is a really soft dough, so it's easier to handle if you chill it a bit (plus it gives the flavors a chance to deepen). But if you put them in the oven right away, it will work just fine.

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.

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.

A kokumi peptide, γ-Glu-Val-Gly, can enhance thick flavour, aftertaste and oiliness in reduced-fat peanut butter. This suggests that addition of γ-Glu-Val-Gly can improve the flavour of low-fat foods.

Why do my peanut butter cookies taste weird? ›

Your other source of fat should be butter, not shortening. 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.

The leavening power of baking soda is about three to four times stronger than baking powder. This means that you need a lot less baking soda in your recipes. If a recipe calls for baking soda and you only have baking powder, you need to use the right baking soda to baking powder conversion.

Baking powder

Baking powder contains sodium bicarbonate and acidic salts. The reaction of these two ingredients results in a cookie that is soft and thick, but slightly harder.

Dry – “Dry” or “Crumbly” dough is a product of over-mixing or using too much of any ingredient during the mixing process. This can be reversed by adding one to two tablespoons of liquid (water, milk or softened butter) to your mix.

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.

Incorrect Fat-to-Sugar Ratio: The proportion of fat (butter, oil or shortening) to sugar is important for the texture of a cookie. If there isn't enough fat, the cookies may be crumbly. Measure out the correct amounts of fat and sugar for your recipe.

Why Peanut Butter Separates. Big peanut butter brands often use special oils to help extend shelf life, and stabilize the mixture to prevent separating. But natural nut butters lack the stabilizer, so the peanut's own oils separate from the butter itself, especially at warmer temperatures.