Soft Peanut Butter Cookies - The Recipe Rebel (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to soft cookies? ›

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.

Why did my peanut butter cookies turn out hard? This is most likely to happen from over-baking your cookies. Make sure to take them out of the oven when they're still a bit soft in the middles, that way they can finish cooking on their cookie sheets outside the oven.

Eggs, particularly egg yolks. Eggs work to make your cookies soft in two ways: They add a ton of moisture, and the proteins add structure that prevents spreading. Cake flour instead of all-purpose flour. Low in protein and high in moisture, cake flour is used to leaven all sorts of baked goods.

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.

If you don't have cornstarch on hand, there are a few alternative steps you can take to produce the cookie of your dreams. Go heavy on brown sugar. It has more moisture than its granulated counterpart, which means the cookie comes out less crispy. Unsurprisingly, more liquid retention guarantees a softer bite.

Yes, shortening yields chewier cookies than butter does, because butter contains water and shortening doesn't. But you can easily make up for butter's crisping tendencies by using crucial ingredient No. 3… Brown sugar instead of white sugar.

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 don't flatten the cookies first, then the fork does double duty – it performs both functions. One very subtle result of creating the pattern is that the little tips of dough bake up crisper than the rest of the cookie, giving you both a bit of additional texture and deeper taste where the dough is more baked.

Baking soda is typically used for chewy cookies, while baking powder is generally used for light and airy cookies. Since baking powder is comprised of a number of ingredients (baking soda, cream of tartar, cornstarch, etc.), using it instead of pure baking soda will affect the taste of your cookies.

Cookies become hard when the moisture in them evaporates. This can be caused by leaving them out in the air for too long, baking them for too long, or storing them improperly. The lack of moisture makes the cookies hard and dry, which makes them difficult to enjoy.

What softens a cookie? ›

The best way to soften up those hard cookies is something you probably already have in your kitchen… bread! That's right, a piece of fresh bread will make those tough treats soft and chewy.

This may not sound like a lot, but it is enough that it can affect the quality of your cookies – adding too much peanut butter can make them dry, hard, and crumbly.

As you can see, the peanut butter replaces the flour and butter. Why is this? Peanut butter is basically ground peanut flour mixed with peanut oils.

Most peanut butter cookie aficionados will agree that Skippy (Jif is a close second) is the best peanut butter to use… it just behaves better, and it gives the cookies that flavor and texture that we have all come to know and love.

Water in the butter will aid in leavening the cookie during baking and any remaining water after baking will contribute to moistness in the cookie's texture. The higher butter cookie has slightly more spread than the low butter and control. The biggest difference is in the flavor and mouthfeel of the cookie.

If you want to make those cookies even harder next time, reduce the fat by 50 percent. These reductions should make your cookies sufficiently hard. If not, you can increase the baking time slightly, which will allow more time for moisture to evaporate as the cookie bakes and yield a firmer cookie.

Softened butter and melted butter are not the same. Using melted butter will change the texture of whatever you're baking. If you only want the butter to soften for spreading, microwave it on the Defrost setting (30%) in 5-second increments until it's softened as desired.