Soft Peanut Butter Cookies - The Recipe Rebel (2024)

FAQs

What is the trick to making soft cookies? ›

Baking cookies quickly in a hot oven – at 375 degrees F as opposed to a lower temperature – will make for soft results. They'll bake fast instead of sitting and drying out in the oven's hot air. Ever so slightly underbaking your cookies will give you softer results than cooking them the full amount the recipe says.

the more the gluten develops and they become hard and dry and an unfavorable texture. reason no 3 you're over baking them. make sure you take them out when they're just slightly golden brown. and then they'll continue to cook a little bit on the counter at room temperature.

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

For soft cookies, use: Brown sugar, as it has a high moisture content and retains moisture better than white sugar. Also, when combined with eggs, brown sugar can prevent spreading (taller cookies tend to be softer and fluffier). Shortening instead of butter or in addition to butter.

Your other source of fat should be butter, not shortening. Butter will make your cookies taste buttery; shortening will make them taste suspiciously vacant, like Katy Perry's voice post-autotune. Yes, shortening yields chewier cookies than butter does, because butter contains water and shortening doesn't.

Simply lay the bread at the bottom of the container and pile your cookies on top of it, seal the lid, and wait a few hours. The cookies will soak up all the moisture from the bread and by the next morning, they will taste as good as the day they came out of the oven gooey.

Dry – “Dry” or “Crumbly” dough is a product of over-mixing or using too much of any ingredient during the mixing process. This can be reversed by adding one to two tablespoons of liquid (water, milk or softened butter) to your mix.

If you bake too many cookies (as if there is such a thing!) and are concerned about them going stale, just add a slice of white bread to the storage container to keep them from hardening.

Also, underbaking them by a minute or 2 will help them retain a dense, chewy bite, explains Jenny McCoy, pastry baking arts chef-instructor at the Institute for Culinary Education in New York. Adding more moisture to your dough in the form of extra butter, egg yolks, or brown sugar will make your cookies even softer.

How to make peanut butter soft? ›

When using peanut butter only, the key is heat. Peanut butter is naturally high in fat, but that fat is nearly solid at room temperature. In order to soften it up, you need some heat. In my case, I heated two tablespoons in a heat-proof bowl and then stirred like crazy.

If the dough seems too soft, chill it for 10 to 15 minutes before baking. Use shortening instead of butter or a combination of the two if you don't want to sacrifice that buttery flavor. The dough was too wet. Using the wrong size egg could also add extra liquid, resulting in too much spreading.

The most common mistake with peanut butter cookies is using the wrong type of peanut butter. The BEST peanut butter for today's cookies is a processed creamy peanut butter, preferably Jif or Skippy.

Different types of sugars affect the texture because they absorb different amounts of water. Remember moisture is the key! White sugar creates crispier cookies and brown sugar creates chewier cookies.

Light corn syrup is sometimes used in specialist cakes and confectioneries to help keep baked products soft and doughy for longer. Use just a tablespoon for a regular batch of tasty cookies.

Flour adds fluff and texture to the cookies. Adding too little flour can cause cookies to be flat, greasy, and crispy. Most recipes assume you'll use all-purpose, but if you want a lighter, crumblier cookie texture, choose one with a lower protein content such as cake-and-pastry flour.