Soft Peanut Butter Cookies - The Recipe Rebel (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to making cookies soft and chewy? ›

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

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.

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.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

If you bake too many cookies (as if there is such a thing!) and are concerned about them going stale, just add a slice of white bread to the storage container to keep them from hardening.

Microwave Method:Place the cookies on a microwave-safe plate. Microwave them on high for about 10-15 seconds. Check after 10 seconds to avoid overheating. The heat from the microwave will soften the cookies, making them more tender and easier to chew.

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.

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.

Why are my cookies dry and crumbly? This is most likely a classic case of using too much flour. It's crucial to properly measure the flour in this recipe, as even 1 extra tablespoon of flour can completely change the structure of the cookies. You also might have over baked them!

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.

What happens if you add too much peanut butter to peanut butter cookies? ›

This may not sound like a lot, but it is enough that it can affect the quality of your cookies – adding too much peanut butter can make them dry, hard, and crumbly.

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.

If the dough seems too soft, chill it for 10 to 15 minutes before baking. Use shortening instead of butter or a combination of the two if you don't want to sacrifice that buttery flavor. The dough was too wet. Using the wrong size egg could also add extra liquid, resulting in too much spreading.

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.

Different types of sugars affect the texture because they absorb different amounts of water. Remember moisture is the key! White sugar creates crispier cookies and brown sugar creates chewier cookies.

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.

There are a few things you can do to add liquid to your cookie dough if it is too dry and crumbly. One option is to add milk, water, or another liquid until the dough is the right consistency. You can also try adding melted butter or shortening. If your dough is still too dry, you may need to add more flour.