Recipe: Easy Peanut Butter Cookies

I don’t like peanut butter cookies.

Seriously. As a kid, they were the ones I didn’t take from a mixed plate of cookies. And if peanut butter cookies were the only ones offered, I might skip dessert entirely.

Last week, however, peanut butter cookies became the topic of a lively round-table of authors hosted by literary agent Ken Sherman at the Clarksville Writer’s Conference.

As we each told a bit about ourselves and our work – you know, like on the first day of school – Ken shared a childhood anecdote centering on said cookies.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “we went to visit family, and I remember there was this big plate of peanut butter cookies.” We all knew the kind – those heavy cookies with the hash marks on the top, made by pressing them with a fork. “I think I ate the entire plate.”

That was when he was five years old. “Later,” he continued, “I searched everywhere for those cookies. I went to every bakery in San Francisco and LA, to pastry shops in Europe.” But he couldn’t find them. “I thought they must be something really special. They had to have come from somewhere fancy.”

Then one evening, Ken was having dinner with friends, regaling them with the tale of his cookie quest. “Wait just a minute –” his hostess said, retreating into the kitchen. She returned with a plate of peanut butter cookies, crosshatching and all.

Ken tasted them and said with glee, “These are the cookies!”

She retreated into the kitchen once again and returned, Skippy peanut butter jar in hand. The recipe for the sought-after cookies was right there, on the side of the jar.

The moral: sometimes, we make things out to be a lot more complicated than they actually are. Sometimes, what we were looking for was there under our noses the whole time.

After such an Aesopian tale, and after speaking passionately on the purpose of Blondes Can’t Cook – to understand the unfamiliar through the intimate venue of food – I couldn’t admit I didn’t like peanut butter cookies.

So I decided to give them another try.

I stopped by the grocery on the way home, and picked up a jar of Skippy. Alas, there was no recipe on the side! I picked up Jif, Peter Pan, the store brand – nothing but nutritional tables.

A quick internet search resolved the quandary, and again reinforced this story’s moral: we make things more complicated than they have to be. How?

There were only three ingredients to the peanut butter cookies. Three. Ingredients. I’ve never made a dish using only three ingredients! Then I looked again and realized I had missed one – actually, there were four ingredients. But still – how much simpler could it get?

When I tasted the batter, I had to admit, it was pretty good. And, I couldn’t complain about how easily the cookies took on their hash marked aesthetic, how they clung to neither hand nor fork due to the natural oils in the peanut butter.

When they came out of the oven, the deal was sealed. After all these years, I’ve learned to like peanut butter cookies.

As for Ken, he got his fill of peanut butter cookies, as they became a recurring theme at the Conference. After his story, one of the writers went out to her car and returned with a peanut butter cookie left over from a meal at a local casino. The next day, the catered lunches included peanut butter cookies as a desert option. And of course, I had to share some of the cookies I’d made

Now, it’s your turn. Even the youngest chefs among our readers can master this surprisingly easy dessert.

Prep time: 20 minutes

Yield: About 2 dozen cookies.

Ingredients:

1 16 oz jar of creamy peanut butter

2 eggs

2 cups sugar

2 tbsp vanilla extract

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 325 Fahrenheit.
Blend all ingredients in a large mixing bowl
Roll the dough into one-inch balls. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet, leaving 2 o 3 inches between each cookie.
Using a fork, press each dough ball. The cookie should flatten easily. Press the fork again at a perpendicular angle to create the classic design.
Bake for 8 to 10 minutes.
Cookies will expand during baking. Allow to cool completely before removing from the pan.