Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

I was reading through some food blogs on Saturday morning and came across a post about Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies and they sounded good. Very good, actually. So good that I wanted to get up and make some, however the peanut butter in the recipe I was reading came from peanut butter chips, which I don't have access to so I went searching for another.

I came across this recipe from Taste.com.au and it looked suspiciously easy. I don't know why they were suspiciously easy as I have previously made three ingredient peanut butter cookies and they turned out quite well, but a quick read through the reviews on the Taste.com.au recipe showed that most people found them far too sweet and rich. I see now that those were my comments on my previous post too, so I set about trying to add some subtlety to these easy cookies.

Using the Taste.com.au recipe as a guide and the reviews for inspiration, I reduced the sugar, peanut butter and chocolate chips to 3/4 cup and added some flour to improve the consistency of the batter. Some reviews added as much as 1/2 a cup, but I found 2 tablespoons was all I needed. I used smooth peanut butter as that was all we had. While mixing the dough I had a taste and found it to be almost overpoweringly peanutty, so I added 2 tablespoons of white sugar to give it more sweetness. The added sugar made the dough quite crumbly, but I didn't want to risk adding more egg. In hindsight, perhaps some melted butter may have assisted the binding as our peanut butter is of the low fat variety. The recipe tells you the press the cookies with a fork before placing them in the oven but I found that with my adaptations the mix was too dry for that. The ones I rolled into balls and flattened with my hands turned out much nicer.

My oven usually runs about 20 degrees C colder than indicated on the dial, but this time setting it at 220 degrees C to try and maintain a 200 degree C internal temperature was too high. I found the cookies came out perfectly (for me) after 8 minutes at 200 degrees C on my oven, which gives an internal temperature of 180 degrees C. The cookies are crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.

There's a bit of maths involved with baking in our oven. What makes it even more difficult is that the oven door is solid, so if you want to check your oven thermometer you need to open the door. Sigh. At least the temperature markings on the oven haven't been rubbed off like the markings for the cooktop.

They turned out very well for such a simple recipe. They are still rich in that you can't have more than a couple of them at a time but they aren't overwhelmingly sweet.


Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
adapted from this recipe posted on Taste.com.au

3/4 cup peanut butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 tbs caster sugar
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tbs plain flour
1 egg, lightly beaten
3/4 cup (185g) dark choc bits

Preheat oven to 180°C. Lightly grease two baking trays and line with non-stick baking paper. Combine peanut butter, sugars, bicarbonate of soda, flour and egg in a bowl. Stir in choc bits.

Roll teaspoonfuls of the mixture into balls and place on the prepared tray and flatten slightly. Bake for 8 minutes or until light golden. Leave to cool on the trays then place into an airtight container.