Peanut butter cookies. The kind I really wanted to make was chocolate, but a recipe was surprisingly difficult to find, and most of my cookbooks limit their repertoire of cookies to the basics in their impatience to get on to bars, cakes, and candy. However, we had just enough peanut butter left in the jar, and that would be perfect.
The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion’s version tells you to cream together a cup of shortening, one cup each of granulated sugar and brown sugar, two eggs, a cup of peanut butter, and vanilla. It doesn’t specify whether you should cream with an electric mixer, which certainly would not have been the way we did it when I was growing up, but I tried that method anyway in favor of ending up with very fine-grained cookies. Then it calls for three cups of flour, which is quite a lot, along with two teaspoons of baking soda and a little salt. This produces a crumbly mix that holds together when you grab a handful and roll it into a ball, but it would disintegrate if you followed the traditional method of pressing them down on a cookie sheet with a fork (in fact, the recipe calls itself “peanut butter crisscross”). I baked the cookies in globe shapes instead, and they ended up crumbly on the outside, but soft on the inside as peanut butter should be.
(Photo: Brookside Gardens, winter.)
365 Days of Food 