Sugar Cookies With Peanut Butter

Sugar cookies are a classic dessert that is popular around the globe. The traditional recipe is delicious, but can you improve on sugar cookies?

The good news is that sugar cookies are versatile enough to experiment with different flavors and still end up with a delectable cookie.

After doing some testing ourselves, we ended up creating this amazing sugar cookie recipe with peanut butter. The combination of these two classic cookies is something we fell in love with, and we hope you will too!

Peanut Butter Sugar Cookies – Getting Started

One of the benefits of adding peanut butter to sugar cookies it that it is high in protein, essential minerals, and good fat.

Peanut butter also has a phenomenal flavor that most of us are familiar with. Peanut butter adds a subtle richness that will not overpower the traditional sugar cookie flavor. 

The first thing you will notice when you bake these cookies is the crispy outer shell.

The shell loaded with granulated sugar, and that first bite will reveal a soft and chewy inside, thanks to the peanut butter.

The cookies we made are thick and chewy, but you can make yours super thin if you want the entire bite to be crunchy. You will need to adjust your baking time as thin cookies may burn, so just decrease the baking time by 5 minutes and you will be perfectly safe. 

These sugar cookies look like plain peanut butter cookies due to the criss-cross pattern that we’ve given them, but we know they are well beyond that.

Fun Fact: Bakers invented the criss-cross pattern so they could distinguish plain cookies from those that contained nut butter. It was a clever move because the pattern served as a warning sign to people with a nut allergy. 

Ingredients for Sugar Cookies With Peanut Butter

This recipe is very simple to make and does not require any special equipment. Just some bowls, a whisk, and a cookie sheet like this one. 

When choosing a sugar for the cookies, go with granulated sugar. The bigger the granules, the better to make sure there is texture.

At this point, you know you can forget about the powdered sugar as the results will not be the same. 

Speaking about peanut butter, I know many of you love crunchy peanut butter. Sadly, I don’t recommend crunchy peanut butter for this recipe. The smooth peanut butter will ensure that the cookies have that classic sugar cookie texture.

These cookies are really great to make and require minimal chilling time. You can pop these for 5 minutes in a freezer before baking and you are good to go.

If you have time, you can chill these in a fridge for 30 minutes, but the freezer method works just as well and ensures your cookies have a nice crispy shell and soft inner texture.

How to Serve and Store Peanut Butter Sugar Cookies

We cannot explain how amazing these pair with some herbal fruit tea or just a glass of warm or cold milk. We also think the flavors go especially well with malted milk.

You can serve these as a snack, as a dessert, for breakfast, or a sweet boost in your lunchbox.

These cookies keep very well, so if you store these in a cold and dry place, you will be able to enjoy these through the week – if they manage to last that long!

How to Make Sugar Cookies With Peanut Butter

Step 1: Gather your ingredients.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Step 2: In a mixing bowl, cream together butter and ¾ cup granulated sugar.

Keep the rest of the sugar for rolling.

Step 3: Add in peanut butter, egg, vanilla, and beat until smooth. 

Step 4: Fold in flour and baking powder. Stir to combine.

Step 5: Shape the dough into 15 balls and roll through the reserved granulated sugar. Make sure you coat them well.

Arrange the balls on the cookie sheet and press each with a fork. (If you want, you can arrange cookies on two baking sheets.)

Step 6: Bake the cookies for 9-10 minutes. Cool on a wire rack and serve.

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