Skinny PB Cookies (Can be vegan too!)

Alrighty guys, so I have a lot of peanut butter lovers in my family, including me! But my dad LOVES peanut butter cookies and frankly, I never was a huge fan of them…weird right? I always just wanted chocolate chip oatmeal as a kid 🙂

But I go back to school in about a week and three days, so my boyfriend will be here in about a week and HE loves peanut butter cookies too. (By the way, most of the recipes on this blog come from me baking and cooking for Luke!) So in short, I wanted to find a healthy peanut butter cookie recipe that I would love too! And I didn’t just find one great recipe, I found two!

Both are from Chocolate Covered Katie’s website (she’s the best) and I will have the links to her recipes for these on here as well. I will give you her exact recipes on here with her version in the parentheses but the bulleted list is my version. My versions with both of these cookies are not exactly vegan…because I did not have any applesauce on hand and so I used milk instead! But I pleased my dad so I take that as a successful peanut butter cookie!

http://chocolatecoveredkatie.com/2011/12/11/secret-peanut-butter-cookies/

Skinny Peanut Butter Cookies

• 1/2 cup peanut butter (or almond or sunbutter)
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 4 tbsp flour (3 tbsp flour in Katie’s, flour can be whole-wheat pastry, all-purpose white, spelt, Bob’s gf mix all work)
• 1/4 cup sugar (or evaporated cane juice) but I used plain sugar
• 2 tbsp brown sugar (or coconut sugar)
• 2 tbsp milk (2 tbsp applesauce in Katie’s)
• 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract (I eyeballed this, could have been 1 full teaspoon)
• optional: tiny pinch salt

Preheat oven to 350°

First, mix all of your dry ingredients in a large/ medium-sized bowl: baking soda, flour, sugar (evaporated cane juice), brown sugar (coconut sugar), and optional salt. Mix them very well, then add the milk or applesauce as well as the vanilla extract. The bowl really doesn’t have to be huge because this recipe only makes around a dozen cookies! So it’s a small lump of dough when you’re finished.

Finally add in that 1/2 cup of peanut butter, or other nut butter, and stir well until everything is combined. Like I said, I have never made peanut butter cookies before so it was shocking to see how little of flour I needed. I also went half and half on the flour (half whole wheat and half all purpose).

BEFORE you make them into balls, Katie recommended that you chill the dough first for soft cookies. So I stuck my batter into the freezer for ten minutes before forming the balls. This ten minutes allowed me to set up my next batch of cookies!

Form one-inch balls, and you’ll come out with a dozen cookies like me. Lightly spray a cookie sheet and place your dozen cookies on there (they don’t spread out much at all which is nice!) Now, you don’t have to do what I did, but for tradition’s sake, I took a fork and did the criss-cross pattern on each cookie and sprinkled a pinch of sugar on each cookie as well. 🙂

Bake cookies for 8-10 minutes. Katie says 8, then take them out and leave them cool on the cookie sheet for 5 minutes. I was paranoid at how underdone they looked, so I left them in for about 10 minutes, and they turned out great! But don’t get scared when they look underdone. They are mostly peanut butter, so the cookies will appear that way! If you try to make them smaller, her recipe says you can make 16 with only 65 calories per cookie. Either way, they are still under 100 calories, super healthy with your fats only coming from the nutritious peanut butter!

Enjoy! This will definitely be my go-to recipe for PB cookies!

P.S. other PB recipe will be in a separate blog post 🙂