Classic Peanut Butter Cookies

Hello, everyone!  Happy Thursday, and, since it's the first Thursday of the month, it's time for the cookie of the month today!  Since we're going back to school this month (13 days in this house...but...who's counting?  Me!!), I figured we'd do a classic, soft peanut butter cookie.  I made one into a sandwich cookie with some Nutella, but to be even more fun, slap some jelly between two of these cookies, and have a PB&J sandwich cookie!

I have mentioned it before, that for my daughter's first birthday, I did a Milk and Cookies themed birthday.  I made over 200 cookies, from scratch, and the most popular one was, by far, the peanut butter cookie.

It was a little bittersweet to have my now 4 year old help me make these cookies again.  When I made cookies for the Milk and Cookies party, I started making cookie dough about a month before, and popping them into the freezer.  The day before the party, I spent the day baking.  All.  Of.  The.  Cookies.

And I'd do it again.  It was awesome!

Anyway, let's get started with today's cookies!  

Here's the grocery list for this one today:

1 stick of butter, softened

1 C of peanut butter

1/2 C brown sugar

1/2 C granulated sugar

1 egg

3/4 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp Kosher salt

1 1/2 C All purpose flour

It may seem like a lot, but I bet you have all of this in your pantry right now.  I know a lot of schools are now peanut free, so if you choose to make it with like an almond butter, let me know how it works!  I haven't tried it yet, but I want to!

So, anyway, to start, cream the butter for a minute on its own, and add in the sugars to cream together for a couple of minutes.  

Once you have the lovely butter and sugars combined, add in the egg and mix these well.

Oh, glorious peanut butter!  Let's add in a full cup, and mix well.  Once you have the peanut butter well incorporated, make sure to scrape the bottom, and fold everything in together, nice and pretty.  

In a separate bowl, put in the flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda; whisk them together to make sure they are well mixed.  While your mixer is running, slowly add in the flour mix, just until it comes together.  Seriously.  You do not want to over mix this.  Over mixing will be the death of a soft cookie.

One of my daughter's favorite things to do is to help mix the flour, even though she usually makes a bit of a mess.  But that's okay, that's a part of the fun of cooking!

Once the dough has just come together, scrape the edges of the bowl and bottom again.  Scoop out about 1 Tbs of dough, and roll into a ball.  Place each dough ball onto a parchment lined baking sheet.  Also, at this point, preheat your oven to 350*!

You can bake them as is, but the classic peanut butter cookie has the crosshatches, so let's do a quick go-over on how to do that.  It's quite simple, really.  Just gently press a fork into the top of the cookie, rotate 90*, and press gently again!  Perfect!

Once they are all pressed (if you want to go with the classic look!), pop them into the oven and bake for 8-10 minutes.  You want these to be just starting to brown on the edges.  Once they are out of the oven, let them sit on the hot pan for another 5 minutes, then transfer the cookies to a cooling rack, to cool completely.

The texture of these cookies is just perfect.  They are soft, moist, and begging to be made into a sandwich cookie!  The Nutella was really lovely (who doesn't love chocolate and peanut butter?!), however, like I said, jelly would be a lovely option also!