Growing up peanut butter cookies were one of my favorite cookies my grandmother would make. My brother and grandfather liked them too. So it was pretty common for them to be the cookie found in jars on the top shelf in my gram’s kitchen next to the fridge. Besides cookies, I’m not the biggest fan of peanut butter. I don’t like PB&J. I’ll on rarely protein desperate situation put it on an english muffin. My preference is really for almond butter instead. This I’d practically eat from the jar. The result is more often than not peanut butter isn’t always present in my house.
I discovered this fact this weekend when I went to make cookies with my son. I had literally a crusty tablespoon of peanut butter in the jar. So I had two choices. Go to the store, or improvise. It just so happens that I had a brand new tub of freshly ground almond butter in my pantry. So I decided to make the substitution. Below is the altered recipe.
Almond Butter Cookies
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1/2 cup almond butter
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 1/2 cup flour
- Cream together butter and almond butter.
- Add the baking powder, baking soda, sugar and mix
- Add the egg and vanilla and mix
- Add in flour and beat until well mixed
- Make small round balls of mixture. Press them crosswise with a fork
- Bake 375 degrees for 7-10 minutes.
One thing you need to know about fresh almond butter or peanut butter for that matter is the oil pools on the top. You have to stir it back in and if you don’t mix it well enough, whatever you put the butter on is a bit oily. I wasn’t QUITE careful enough in my mixing my almond butter and my batter ended up a little greasy. Also, as usual I made my balls of dough too big and ended up with BIG cookies that spread into one another. The recipe above has 1/4 cup more flour than I used. (It might actually need more than that. I’m guessing) When I finished mixing mine I realized more flour is necessary to get the appropriate texture. This is REALLY hard to tell until you start making the balls of dough. I could have probably thrown the first ball back into the bowl. Added the flour and started again but I wanted to see how they’ve turn out. How they turned out was they spread and flattened too much. In truth the taste was fine, but if you like your cookies more compact and chewy. I’d suggest a bit more flour in the mix. Also I think that I could have dressed this up a bit if I’d put a toasted blanched almond in the center about 1/2 way though the bake. I didn’t have any blanched almonds on hand though when I was making the recipe so that is something I’ll have to try next time.