Smitten Kitchen peanut butter cookies

Everyone in our family loves peanut butter. Three members of my family could (and would if I encouraged them) eat peanut butter and honey sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner, every day. We stock up in bulk peanut butter EVERY time we go to the store. So I've been looking for a good peanut butter cookie recipe for years. I've found recipes that are too dry, too crumbly, too fudgey, or too lacking in peanut butter flavor. A glass of milk should be a pleasant accompaniment to a peanut butter cookie- not a basic necessity for swallowing. And although I make an exception for some very special cookies, I usually like to use around a half cup of butter, and not much more- and it's hard to find pb cookie recipes that aren't mostly butter or lard.

I am always trying to make cookies healthier (ridiculous I know, but I have to try) and the kids are always catching on to the slow migration from "oatmeal raisin cookie" to "cookie-shaped-granola-item." So I am hoping that any recipe with peanut butter as a major ingredient will continue to be delicious, no matter how much whole wheat flour or bran it coexists with in the final product. Chocolate chips have been known to perform similar magic in muffins, although I think they reached the limits of their power last winter, with a particularly dense apple/walnut/bran muffin. The girls did not even bother to pick the pick the chips out before deeming them uneatable. (digression over).

All of that is to say- I finally found a winner!


I was browsing through the Smitten Kitchen cookie archives, when I saw that incredible picture and started trying to figure out if we had enough peanut butter in the house to attempt it. We did. They were awesome. I saved half the dough for a party later this week, but the half I made will probably not last the rest of the evening. Wish you were here (not really).