Bread Machine Love: Peanut Butter Cookies

So the topic of desserts came up a while back and the boy did me the grave injustice of not remembering all the different cookies I had made over the course of our time together. Given, my baking output has slacked a bit recently due to calorie-watching, warm weather, and less spare time, but the fact remains — I bake a mean batch of cookies. And lots of them. So it only seems right that I make sure this blog reflects that as well.

Today, another classic: the peanut butter cookie. I typically use a tweaked version of this Allrecipes favorite and mix the whole thing up in the bread machine to save my arms the trouble.

Ingredients: peanut butter/soybean butter, butter, white sugar, brown sugar, egg, milk, vanilla extract, all-purpose flour, baking soda and salt.

Get the oven going in the background, preheating to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Toss together all your greasy ingredients — I usually use soybean butter because it’s what I have in the pantry and it’s indistinguishable from peanut butter in the final product. In this particular batch I did half and half, since we had some leftover peanut stuff as well. You’ll want 1 cup of some form of nut butter, whatever your inclination might be. Cream that together with half a cup of softened butter to get a nice buttery mass.

Toss in half a cup of white sugar and half a cup of packed brown sugar. Creaming the butters and sugars together at this point is recommended, because it will give you a fluffier finished product. I start the machine mixing at this point for the same effect.

While the paddle is spinning (or after you are done creaming it by hand), add in 1 egg, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 3 tablespoons of milk. Make sure they are all thoroughly dispersed in the mixture before moving on.

Add 3/4 teaspoon baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon of salt and mix thoroughly into dough. Of course, you could also just sift the dry ingredients together beforehand, but that seems like a messier way to go about it to me. So I just toss in the dry ingredients in order of amount, smallest portions first.

Finally, add 1 & 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour to the mix and make sure everything is very evenly distributed.

The finished dough should be a pliable-but-solid, greasy-but-handleable mass much like this.

Using an ungreased cookie sheet (I cover mine in wax paper to save cleanup work), plop down rounded tablespoons of dough 2 inches apart. Flatten the balls slightly with a fork unless you like peanut butter igloos.

Let those babies bake for 8 to 10 minutes, watching for the edges to get golden. If you like chewy cookies, take them out at the earlier end of the spectrum and let them cool while they still look sort of soft. By 10 minutes, I can guarantee you’ll have crunchier cookies. These keep really well in the fridge or even on the shelf in a plastic bag, so feel free to keep some on hand for random moments when you might have to bribe your way out with sweets