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Old School Peanut Butter Cookies

Old School Peanut Butter Cookies

Old School Peanut Butter Cookies

This is an archive of a preexisting recipe that I found on Reddit when looking for "gooey peanut butter cookies". I've made some small changes to the recipe, that I'll denote!

Most peanut butter cookies are pretty hard and crunchy, which can be great, but I always prefer a soft/gooey cookie. This is in part because I prefer to make a fat cookie and then bake it at a high heat for a shorter amount of time. This results in a combination of great textures, including the crispiness and browning we all love, while keeping a gooey/soft inside.

Over the years of making this recipe, I've naturally tweaked it to be closer to my stock, standard cookie recipe that is also an edited online recipe. However, the recipe as written in its near ancient 1956 Fannie Farmer cookbook is lovely all its own. I will include the recipe in its original entirety, including the image from Reddit. And I will mark changes I made clearly and include some additional info in the notes!

Notes:

This recipe can take any inclusions you're interested in as long as they are not wet. You can add truly as many chocolate chips, pretzels, etc as you'd like and it can definitely take it. I won't include any info about inclusions other than this, for brevity.

Ingredients

  • 1/2 c butter, margarine, or shortening
  • 1/2 c peanut butter
  • 6 tbsp brown sugar*
  • 6 tbsp white sugar*
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda**
  • 1 c flour

Ingredient Changes:

* The original recipe calls for 1/2 c of each sugar

** Be sure if you replace the brown sugar with white sugar, that you add an acid for the baking soda to react with

Method

  1. Preheat the oven to 425 F.*
  2. Cream all of your fats with your sugars.
    3. Creaming is super easy. Just put all of your fats in a bowl with your sugars and whip the shit out of it with a rubber spatula or wooden/metal spoon. Ideally, all of your sugars will be fully dissolved, but we mostly just want homogeneity and a light, fluffy texture.
  3. Stir vanilla and salt into creamed fats and sugars.
  4. Beat egg into the mixture until light, fluffy, and fairly thickened.
  5. Mix the baking soda into the wet ingredients.**
  6. Stir in flour, mixing only until everything is wet and combined.
  7. Using a large table spoon, take big spoonfuls of the dough and plop them on to a baking sheet with parchment paper. This usually makes 8-12 cookies depending on how heaping you make them.***
  8. Bake for 7-10 minutes. Check them a lot after 7 minutes. They're done when the bottoms are dark and the raised points on the top are deep brown.
  9. Let cool for 5 minutes

Method Changes

* The original recipe uses a more standard oven temperature (350) and bake time (12-15 min). Feel free to follow those directions if you don't want a larger cookie with a crispy, dark outside and soft inside.

** This is a quirk of mine and change to the original recipe. My wife is sensitive to chemical leavening rearing its ugly, alkaline head, and I found that sometimes mixing the leavening in with the flour resulted in a bitter flavor on the outside of the cookies in particular. I found mixing it into the wet ingredients meant it can get fully mixed without worrying about overworking the flour, or having weird pockets.

*** The original recipe makes much smaller cookies, making 25-30.

Variations

You can replace the brown sugar with white, just see previous note.

This recipe is super easy to make vegan. Just replace the egg with a powdered egg replacement and the butter with shortening or vegan butter.

You can replace half of the solid, non peanut butter fat with liquid fat like vegetable oil. This creates a slightly cakier cookie and can save money!

Sometimes, I've reduced the sugars by 1 tbsp each, especially using sweetened peanut butters and this does not meaningfully change the outcome!

The original recipe calls for pastry flour. I've never used this, but I'd imagine it would make the cookies super tender.

I do not recommend replacing the flour and leavening with self-rising flour as I've never done this.

Original Recipe and References

I found the original recipe here on r/OldRecipes on reddit.