easy flourless peanut butter cookies

These have to be the easiest cookies to make ever. Four ingredients, made and in and out the oven in 30 minutes, and no flour!

They are crumbly and soft and if you want to add a 5th ingredient I urge you to press in some dark chocolate chips.

Please use good quality peanut butter for these, I opted for Whole Earth organic peanut butter which has nice chunky peanut pieces in it, and a lot less oily than standard peanut butter.

Update - 14/7 - Something I forgot to say! I tried these with a mixture of honey and sugar too, 3/4 of the sugar and 1/4 of soft set honey which works just as well. I think half and half might even work too!

Makes 24 cookies
adapted from joy the baker

1 cup (200g) good quality crunchy peanut butter
1 cup (200g) of brown or caster sugar
1 large egg, beaten
1 tsp of baking powder

Preheat your oven to 180c / gas mark 4. Grease and line a flat baking sheet. This recipe makes two batches, if you have two trays you can cook them at once or cook in batches.

Add your peanut butter, sugar and baking powder to a mixing bowl, stir well to combine the ingredients. Add in your beaten egg and mix for a few minutes until you have a soft dough.

Form into walnut sized dough balls and add to your baking sheet, press down with a fork. Bake for 10 minutes until golden brown.
Leave to cool completely on the baking tray (I know, torture!) so they harden slightly - they are quite soft when they come out of the oven.

Serve with a large cup of tea, feet up and begin dunking!

macadamia, hazelnut and choc chip cookies

These cookies are a result of having lots of tiny packets of nuts from the Graze box we receive. I have to admit we eat the interesting things first (korean chili crackers, wasabi peanuts, chili almonds..) and the plain things like macadamia nuts and hazelnuts generally remain unopened.

So I make them into cookies!



I based this recipe on this one over at Joy the Baker- but replacing the white chocolate with 70% dark and using a mixture of nuts. The best part of this recipe is the browned butter, it gives the cookies a wonderful nutty flavour, which obviously goes with the nuts!

Macadamia, Hazelnut and Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Makes about 12 very big cookies or 24 smaller ones
(I used cups for this recipe so I'm afraid I have no grams conversion!)

1/2 cup unsalted butter - softened
1 cup caster sugar
2 tablespoons of milk (I added a touch more to the end as my dough was a bit dry)
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 and 3/4 cup plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt

50gs macadamia nuts
50gs hazlenuts
50gs dark chocolate

Preheat your oven to 190c / gas mark 6

Heat your butter on a medium heat in a saucepan, stirring regularly. After about 5 minutes you should see brown bits appearing in the butter, once this happens remove the butter from the heat, leave to cool for a 5 minutes more.

Once your butter is cooled add it to your sugar in a large bowl, slowly mixing it in. Then add in your egg and combine. Add milk and vanilla.
Then slowly add in your dry ingredients (except nuts and chocolate).

Bash up your macadamias and hazelnuts in a freezer bag so that they are coarsely chopped.
Chop your chocolate in to medium chunks - however small you like them.
Add your nuts and chocolate to the mixture.

For large cookies spoon tablespoon ( I made big ones) fulls on to a greased and lined baking sheet, for smaller ones aim for a generous heaped teaspoon.

Bake for approx 10 minutes until golden. Leave to cool for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack.

Eat with a lovely frothy coffee or a glass of milk!

Sunday baking...

Lately I've been cooking a lot with chocolate - brownies, biscotti, more brownies - I was really craving oatmeal raisin cookies after this blog post on Smitten Kitchen. I tried the recipe from Friends (I'm not sure if it was an official Friends recipe though, lol) a couple of years ago and they were indeed the best oatmeal raisin cookies ever. I don't know why it took me such a long time to make them again, they are perfect cookies.



I used the recipe from A Spoonful of Sugar in the end and it turned out some gorgeous cookies - crumbly, chewy and crispy.

The only thing I'd change about this is the amount of sugar, as they are a bit too sweet, even for me. I think next time I will go down to 200g in total of brown sugar. The mixture was quite dry anyway so I think taking out the sugar will help next time.

The beauty of this recipe is that it makes LOTS of cookies, my batch made about 45 - probably more if I hadn't made the first batch bigger than I should have, the cookies spread out quite a bit when they bake.
I froze half of the mixture. To do this form into dough balls, freeze on a tray and then chuck them in a freezer bag - you can cook them from frozen (I'd double the cooking time for this). I like doing this, nothing cheers up a bad day like fresh cookies made with no effort.

I think next time I am going to experiment with a bit of lemon zest or maybe cranberries and raisins.


xx