Miracle Cookies

Neither the lovely name nor the recipe was my idea - I got the recipe from Kay, who often comments here on my blog and who I have come to regard as a long-distance friend from the very pleasant email correspondence we have started some time ago.

Peanut butter is the main ingredient of these cookies, so you won't be able to serve them to anyone who is allergic to nuts. But there is no flour in them, so maybe you know someone who has to make sure their food does not contain gluten and they like peanut butter - then this is the right cookie for them :-)

You need: 

1 cup peanut butter (creamy or crunchy)

1 cup sugar

1 egg

some vanilla extract (it works without that, too; I used vanilla sugar, as you can see in the picture)
chocolate chips... if you have them and want them in your cookies.

I bought these so-called "chocolate droplets", they keep their shape even after baking, and as I so like the taste of peanut butter combined with chocolate, I wanted to add them. But the recipe works very well even without any addition like this.

Mix everything together very well.

In my case, the mixture ended up greasy (of course; it is peanut BUTTER after all!) and crumbly like this:

Roll out into balls and squeeze them a little flat on the baking tray, like this:

I got twenty cookies out of this mixture. Next time I make them, I will add less (or no) chocolate chips; they made it a bit difficult to form the balls, crumbling off the mixture. Kay tells me when she does not have chocolate, she presses her thumb into the balls and fills the dent with jam - a good idea which I think I will try out, too, with one of my mother's lovely home-made jams.

Now bake the cookies at 350F (around 180C) for 12-15 minutes. Keep checking on them - mine were doing just fine, until I decided I had enough time to brush my teeth while the cookies were still in the oven...

 

Was I cross with myself for having done that!!!

When I took the cookies out, they were too brown; not actually burnt to cinder, but not the way they should have been. So, do NOT go away from the oven, thinking you'll have plenty of time to do something else...!

Once you have taken the tray out, don't touch the cookies for at least 20 minutes, just leave them on the cooling rack. If you try to pick them up too early, they will simply fall apart. I did not try it, but I trust Kay's word on this :-)

The finished cookies were still very nice - even though they did not look it... I took them to my parents' garden, where we were celebrating their 46th wedding anniversary. Not that many were left, just enough for me to have them the next day with my afternoon coffee.

So, the name "Miracle Cookies" has acquired a new meaning - it was a miracle my family dared eating them at all :-D

Thank you once again, Kay, for the recipe; next time, they will turn out the way they should!