PB & C (Peanut Butter and Cheese) Cookies Recipe on Food52 (2024)

FAQs

Why are my 3 ingredient peanut butter cookies falling apart? ›

There are a few reasons why your cookies are falling apart. The wrong ratio of ingredients, such as too little sugar or peanut butter will make them fall apart. The wrong type of peanut butter may cause them to fall apart. Or using old eggs may create crumbly cookies.

Peanut butter and cheese certainly goes well together but you may find it slightly lacking. You need to add something sweet into the mix. You need the triple trio of tantalising tongue tinglers (salt, sugar and fat) as they really complement each other.

Why are my cookies dry and crumbly? This is most likely a classic case of using too much flour. It's crucial to properly measure the flour in this recipe, as even 1 extra tablespoon of flour can completely change the structure of the cookies. You also might have over baked them!

That's because the first recipe books to include peanut butter cookies recommended using forks to flatten the dough. Eventually more people started recommended a criss-cross pattern over parallel lines, because it flattened the cookie more uniformly.

Use more granulated sugar than brown sugar.

With all of the peanut butter in this cookie dough, however, too much brown sugar made the cookies so soft that they fell apart.

To avoid this, try using as little flour as possible while preparing to roll your dough. 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.

“A slice of cheddar with a pronounced bite helps to break through the rich mouthfeel of peanut butter,” explains Will Sissle, a cheesemonger at the new Whole Foods Market in Boston's South End.

Secondary 1: sharp cheddar cheese only - preferably extra sharp, good cheddar (like Tillamook). The cheese has to compete with your good, real peanut butter. Secondary 2: whole wheat bread - with the powerful elements of real peanut butter, extra sharp cheddar, and hot sauce, white bread just can't hold its own. Enjoy!

You might choose to have a sharp cheddar, a semi-soft blue cheese, and a hard cheese like parmesan or gruyere. Or maybe a cheddar, soft brie, and a gouda. Add nuts (candied pecans, cayenne maple glazed walnuts, Rosemary Olive Oil Marcona Almonds, etc.), and have a sweet element on the cheese board too.

Chill your cookie dough! The dough is extremely soft due to the creamy peanut butter, eggs, and butter and if it's not cold going into the oven, the cookies will spread all over your baking sheet. I chilled this cookie dough for 24 hours and my cookies were soft, thick perfection.

How do you know when PB cookies are done? ›

How to Tell When Peanut Butter Cookies Are Done. Like other drop cookies, peanut butter cookies and peanut butter blossoms are usually cooked until the edges are light brown.

They are about 75% moisture, 12% protein, 10% fat and 2ish % sugar. The white provides strength, stability and moisture. Yolks, where all of the fat is in an egg, increase richness, tenderness and flavor. Therefore, if you put an extra egg, you will get a chewier cookie.

The fork marks also encourage the cookies to bake more evenly and brown evenly. If we skipped that step, these cookies would be so thick that they'd barely spread, and they may not bake all the way through.

One reason could be that you overcooked them. Another reason could be that you didn't add enough moisture to the dough. Finally, your peanut butter cookies might be dry and crumbly if you used a natural peanut butter that doesn't have any added oil.

These early recipes do not explain why the advice is given to use a fork, though. The reason is that peanut butter cookie dough is dense, and unpressed, each cookie will not cook evenly. Using a fork to press the dough is a convenience of tool; bakers can also use a cookie shovel (spatula).

Too much flour: If you add too much flour to your cookie dough, it will be dry and crumbly. Make sure to measure your flour correctly using a kitchen scale or by spooning it into your measuring cup and then leveling it off. Not enough fat: Fat helps to bind the ingredients together and make cookies chewy.

But because natural peanut butters don't contain these stabilizers, the oil in peanuts tends to separate from the peanut solids when sitting on the shelf. The process of oils and solids separating, known as syneresis, is completely safe, but it's still really irritating.

Adding too little butter can cause the cookies to be tough and crumbly. You should use unsalted butter to control the salt content, but if you only have salted on hand, reduce the amount of added salt accordingly. Sugar sweetens the cookies and makes them an enticing golden brown.