Hands-down, the best peanut butter cookie I’ve ever had and I consider myself something of a connoisseur. You can forgo the sandwich filling and the cookie part is satisfying all by itself.
I think the key to great peanut butter cookies is using all-natural peanut butter, the kind you have to stir, that contains nothing but peanuts. Stirring the oil in is a bit of a pain but I find using a single chopstick is much easier than using a spoon.
The cookie dough comes together pretty easily. Not healthy though, with all that sugar and butter!
The resulting dough is halved and each half is flattened into a disc, wrapped, and chilled.
After chilling, it’s rolled out and cut into small rectangles.
The rectangles are scored with a fork on top and put on lined baking sheets and then the instructions say to chill them again before baking. What with my stash of diet Coke and case of whatever fruit-flavored beer was on sale this week, real estate in my fridge is at a premium and I certainly didn’t have room for more than one baking sheet in there. So about half of the cookies went directly into the oven without being chilled first. You can see they spread out quite a bit and did not retain their rectangular shape, going a little curvy on the long sides. The chilled cookies (not pictured) kept their shape.
The filling is more natural peanut butter, confectioner’s sugar, butter, and some cream. It’s beat in the mixer for several minutes and gets very airy and smooth.
I found that less-is-more with regard to how much filling to us. I also found that chilling the filling a bit in the fridge helps it not all smoosh out the sides when constructing the cookie sandwich.
If you like peanut butter cookies, you can’t do much better than this recipe. They are SUPERB. One drawback, however, is that you need to eat them within a few days and because of the filling, they need to be kept chilled.
One idea I had was getting a peanut-shaped cookie cutter and doing crosshatch scoring to make them look like NutterButters. But the rectangles have their own humble charm.
