Best Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why do you put fork marks in peanut butter cookies? ›

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.

The most common mistake with peanut butter cookies is using the wrong type of peanut butter. The BEST peanut butter for today's cookies is a processed creamy peanut butter, preferably Jif or Skippy.

Conventional creamy peanut butter works best for peanut butter cookie recipes because it has a smooth and even texture. My favorite creamy peanut butter brands are Skippy or Jif. Natural peanut butter, made up of just peanuts and salt, is typically very oily and hard to get even.

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.

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.

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.

Peanut Butter Cookie Mix Hacks

Flavor Twist: After creating the dough according to the peanut butter cookie mix instructions, portion the dough into balls then roll in a tasty topping like poppy seeds, sesame seeds or sprinkles, or go for a 4:1 ratio of sugar and dry spice, like ground cinnamon or nutmeg.

A little vanilla extract enhances the peanut flavor just like a little coffee does for enhancing chocolate. These are buttery and peanut buttery, with a balanced amount of sweetness.

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.

Baking soda is typically used for chewy cookies, while baking powder is generally used for light and airy cookies. Since baking powder is comprised of a number of ingredients (baking soda, cream of tartar, cornstarch, etc.), using it instead of pure baking soda will affect the taste of your cookies.

What does Brown Sugar do for a cookie? ›

Brown sugar, meanwhile, is dense and compacts easily, creating fewer air pockets during creaming—that means that there's less opportunity to entrap gas, creating cookies that rise less and spread more. With less moisture escaping via steam, they also stay moist and chewy.

It's been the “mark” of this classic treat for more than eighty years, and for good reason: by flattening this dense cookie dough, it ensures that each cookie bakes evenly. Our kitchen-tested recipe is a classic.

Why are my peanut butter cookies hard? 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.

Which One Should I Use in Cookies? Basically, cookies made with butter spread more and are flatter and crisper if baked long enough. However, they are more flavorful than cookies made with shortening. Cookies made with shortening bake up taller and are more tender, but aren't as flavorful.

That's because the first recipe books to include peanut butter cookies recommended using forks to flatten the dough. Eventually more people started recommended a criss-cross pattern over parallel lines, because it flattened the cookie more uniformly.

Chilling the dough for a few hours will help the peanut butter cookies maintain their shape, and not overly spread when cooked. Dip the fork in sugar. To help keep the fork from sticking when you make a cross-hatch pattern on the cookies, dip the tines in a little granulated sugar between cookies.

So by poking the holes in, the cookie. will ensure that the cookie shape does not spread, which sugar cookies love to do. It also helps it stay nice and flat at the top.

4) Chill that dough!

“When chilled cookies bake, the butter stays in a solid form longer, slowing the spread,” says Dawn.