Three Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies, Plus Chocolate

I observed passover for the first time this year. That means no flour (among other things). In previous years I've made the light and often fat-free meringues or the incredibly unhealthy and delicious toffee matzah crunch.

This year I decided to go somewhere in the middle, though I have to admit it's a mistake to think of these cookies as anything but rich. They have a little bit of protein, because of the peanut butter, but that's as much of a healthy glow as I can lend these four ingredient sugar bombs.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (gluten free)

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup sugar*

1 large egg

1/2 cup chocolate chips

(*you can reduce this to 3/4 cup, if you want)

Mix all ingredients and drop by the tablespoon onto a greased or lined baking sheet. Bake at 375 degrees F for 6-9 minutes. The bottoms will start to brown. Be sure not to overbake, or it'll become crumbly. Don't worry too much. It'd still be delicious crumbs.

When I was putting together the dough, I really didn't expect these to bake into something that had the texture and sturdiness of a cookie. Somehow, they do.

PPK Vegan "Milano" Cookies

I'm visiting my sister in Fishers, Indiana, and decided to make cookies for cookie monday, before flying back home tomorrow morning. My sister has a dairy intolerance, so we dove into the archives of post-punk kitchen for this week's contribution: vegan milano cookies.

I ended up making these a bit smaller than the traditional milano, and they came out crisper than would have been the case with more generously sized cookies.

Normally I'd post the recipe, but this one was unadulterated, just as written. I only have one note to add: although the PPK recipe warns of the dough being difficult and sticky, I had no problems handling the dough or patting out little ovoids.

Checkerboard Cookies

Today's recipe is a time sink. It's the perfect diversion to fill a the Sunday afternoon, when you're stuck inside because of the drippy, windy weather that was supposed to be a category 2 hurricane.

Checkerboard Cookies
(adapted in parts from Baking Obsession, Joy of Baking and Martha Stewart)

I adapted this from a couple recipes on the internet, using a bit less sugar than Baking Obsession, keeping the dutch processed cocoa and baking powder (these don't rise much, at any rate) and adding in lemon zest, so that the white squares have a citrus-y gusto that competes with the deep dark valrhona cocoa that I used.

You could vary the flavors and colors of your batch. (See the notes in the recipe.)

2.5 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
1/4 cup dutch processed cocoa powder
1 tsp lemon zest

To start, sift together the flour, salt, and baking powder.

In another bowl, combine the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl. Mix by hand or machine until the batter is light and fluffy. Once you've achieved a cloud-like texture that pleases you, drop in the egg and vanilla, beating well.

Add in the flour mixture, and stir until homogeneous.

Here's where the fun begins: Divide your dough in two. If you want to make the traditional black and white checkerboards you'll be adding lemon to one half, and cocoa to the other. You could also do this cookie with a few drops of different food coloring in each half, or different flavorings. (Coconut and lime might be a great choice.) The dough is a basic sugar dough, and it'll take almost any mix-in, from ground hazelnuts to instant coffee.

Knead the flavoring (in my case, lemon and cocoa, respectively) into your dough halves. Subdivide those portions (now you have four mounds of dough--two of each flavor) and wrap in plastic and chill for at least 2 hours.



















After the dough has chilled, take one portion of each flavor, and use parchment paper or wax paper to roll it out to a rectangle. You may have to play with the dimensions of your rectangle. Each of my rectangles was 9cm wide by 17cm long by 1cm thick. You're going to need to cut each of the two dough portions into 9 rectangular strips (1cm by 1cm by the length).


















I recommend chilling again after this step, to avoid breaking the delicate strips. Once the dough is firm again, start laying out your checkerboard. You'll be making two checkerboard logs.

Here's what the log will look like:
xox
oxo
xox

For log 1, use vanilla in place of x, and chocolate in place of o.
For log 2, use chocolate in place of x and vanilla in place of o.















Refrigerate the logs. While you have the fridge open, pull out the two remaining dough portions. Roll each portion out into a 17cm by 13cm rectangle. You'll be using this dough to wrap around each log and give it the nice uniform edge. 17cm is the length of each of my logs, and 13cm is the circumference of each log (12), plus 1cm to account for an inexact fit around the edges.

Once your dough is rolled out, pull out the log, and gently wrap the rectangles around their respective doughs.

Because each log is made up of an odd number of strips, there's a dominant flavor in the log. For example, log 1 has 5 vanilla/lemon strips and 4 chocolate strips. That log needs to be wrapped in the chocolate rectangle. Log 2 should be wrapped in the vanilla/lemon rectangle.

Refrigerate yet again. In fact, if you want, you can freeze this dough for up to 2 months before baking. Once the dough is very firm, and you're ready to go, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Use a sharp knife to cut the bar into 1.25cm-thick cookies. Bake about 12 minutes, until the bottoms of the cookies just start to turn golden.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscotti

I am strangely lazy when it comes to twice-baked goods. Give me fiddly little dough shapes to make, or chocolate dipped whathaveyou, and I'm happy to work away at it for a couple of unreasonably focused hours. But biscotti and shortbread both require a discomfiting combination of sporadic attention and accurate timing.



This biscotti isn't particularly traditional--I used both baking powder and soda, and the recipe doesn't have any ground nuts in it. What it does have is a deep chocolate flavor. (You can taste the peanut butter on the inhale of a bite, but it's not overpowering) And, importantly, this recipe withstood my haphazard baking rhythm.



Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscotti

Ingredients:
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup chocolate peanut butter (or nutella, or regular peanut butter)
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 1/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Beat eggs until frothy. Add sugar. Add peanut butter in by hand mixing. Combine (sift together) flour, baking soda and powder and salt. Mix. Add chocolate chips.


Form the dough into two or three logs, and place them on a parchment paper covered baking sheet. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, then pull the sheet from the oven, and reduce the temperature to 200. Using a serrated knife, slice the logs into biscotti shaped pieces. This may be difficult. I got through it by pretending I was a jigsaw machine. Lay each piece on its side.

Bake again (at 300 now) for 10-15 minutes. Stay on the short end of the baking time on this and the next step to create biscotti that retains a softer center.

Pull the sheet from the oven, flip all the pieces and bake again for 10-15 minutes.

Done. These are best enjoyed with a hot beverage and a long dunk.

Crispy Mint Creme Cookies

I'm not sure how this happened. I was trying to bake a simple chocolate crinkle cookie base for a chocolate topped cookie that has a thin mint layer. But I ended up with something that looked and felt disappointingly like a full size version of cookie crisp cereal pieces--light and crispy where I was banking on having dark, rich, and chewy.

They didn't turn out bad. Just... not quite what I was looking for. On the bright side, the mint creme layer was brilliant. When I did this, I ended up with double the mint creme I needed, so I've adjusted the recipe below.

Mint Creme
(from Gourmet's peppermint patties recipe)

1 1/4 cups confectioner’s sugar

3/4 T Karo Syrup (or golden syrup)

3/4 T water

1/4 tsp peppermint extract

1/2 T shortening

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl, until they come together into a clumpy mess. Turn the bowl over onto a counter (preferably wax paper covered) and knead until the creme comes together. In its final form, it'll look almost like a marshmallow. (But it feels like fondant.)

Set it aside.

Crispy Cookies

Your mileage may vary here. I'm still not entirely sure what I did. But this is some kind of Mangled version of these, from Betty Crocker.

1/4	cup vegetable oil
2	oz unsweetened baking chocolate, melted, cooled
1	cup granulated sugar
1	teaspoons vanilla
2	eggs
1	cup all-purpose flour
1	teaspoon baking powder
1/4	teaspoon salt
8 oz	milk chocolate (for finishing)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F

Mix the oil, chocolate, sugar and vanilla. Add in eggs, one at a time, while mixing. Add in the flour, baking powder and salt. Once the dough starts to come together (mine never stopped containing grainy lumps of chocolate, go figure) chill the dough for as long as your patience will allow. For me, that's about 10 minutes, while I clean up ingredients and preheat the oven.

Once the dough is chilled, you can roll it into goopy ball-shapes and drop onto a parchment lined cookie sheet. Don't fret if the dough doesn't roll well. It will spread and smooth in the oven.

Bake for about 10 minutes--until the edges start to brown.

While the cookies bake, form small patties of mint creme. These will go on top of each cookie. You can form a pat by rolling a ball, and pressing down with the palm of your hand.

Once the cookies are out of the oven, press a mint creme patty on the top of each cookie, and wait for the cookie to cool.

Once cool, drizzle or drape chocolate across the top, sealing the mint and cookie together.

I ran out of milk chocolate before I was finished, and I ended up making the last dozen into mint creme cookie sandwiches. Here's what the chocolate-covered version looks like, in cross section:

Peanut Butter Blossom Buttons

Peanut butter blossoms--those nutty, chewy, cookies with a hershey kiss pressed into the top--have always been one of my favorite cookies. Unfortunately, they're also one of the hardest to pack up into a tupperware container and transport. The delicate tips of the kisses get knocked right off.

So it's time for a new take on the peanut butter blossom.

Meet the Peanut Butter Blossom Button.

Peanut Butter Blossom Buttons

(adapted from Hershey's)

Ingredients

Hershey Kisses (one per cookie)

3/4 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup shortening

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup dark brown sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon baking soda

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

Demura sugar (for rolling)

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F.

Beat the shortening and peanut butter in a medium mixing bowl until you can't see the white of the shortening. Add the white and brown sugars, and beat again until the mixture gets a little fluffy.

Add the egg, milk and vanilla.

Stir together Flour, baking soda and salt (I usually just do this in the liquid measuring cup. Saves on dishes) and add to the wet ingredients. Mix until the dough comes together.

At this point, pull out your mini muffin tin. Take pinches of the cookie dough and roll them into 1-inch(ish) balls. Gently roll the balls in the demura sugar, and pop each ball into a hollow on your mini muffin tin. No need to line it or grease the tin, the sugar should keep the cookies from sticking.

Bake for about 10 minutes. While the cookies are baking, unwrap the chocolates (one kiss per cookie). When you can see cracks form in the tops of the cookies, pull it from the oven. Press a kiss, point down, into each cookie. Once you've finished them all, go back and give each kiss a gentle tap to push it down a little further and cement the two together.

Put the pan back in the oven for another minute or so, then remove. Wait for the cookies to cool before tipping them out of the pan, so that you don't muss the chocolate. Or, if you're in a hurry or short on pans, you can use a butter knife to pop them out and let them cool on a baking tray or paper towel.

Wait for the cookie to cool completely before you pack it up.

Honestly, I think these look more like blossoms (think tulips) than the original ever did.

My recipe made about 42 cookies. Your calorie content may vary slightly, but here's how it came out for me.

A few specific notes:

Normal grocery store peanut butter works just fine for these. I used all-natural, fresh-ground, still warm, peanut butter purchased at my local organic hipstermart. But the shelf stable stuff is great too. Creamy will guarantee a perfect cookie, in my opinion, but you can use crunchy if you don't mind a little extra work while mixing.

And speaking of crunchy, I do recommend picking up some of the demura sugar--sometimes sold as raw sugar. It gives the cookies a rough texture that contrasts with the smooth chocolate.