Quick & easy yet delicious and healthy peanut butter cookies.  Twenty minutes from bowl to stomach – so you can get back outside and enjoy this amazing Spring weather!

Happy weekend, everyone.

Adapted from Peanut Butter Cookies by Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks

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Heidi’s Peanut Butter Cookies

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup (4.5 oz) whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 3/8 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
• 3/4 tsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp + 2 tsp grapeseed or olive oil

METHODS

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. In a medium bowl, combine peanut butter, maple syrup, brown sugar, oil and vanilla.  Blend well with a fork until reasonably smooth (I use chunky peanut butter so it was, well, chunky).
3. In another bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda and salt.  Add flour mixture to peanut butter mixture and fold together until just combined; still ‘dusty looking’ as Heidi puts it. 
4. Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto parchment or Silpat-lined baking sheets.  Press down on the top of each mound with the back of a fork (and again, to make a criss-cross pattern).  Bake until crisp, about 10 or 11 minutes (the cookies will not really darken in color when baked).  Be careful not to overbake or the cookies will be dry.  Remove to wire racks to cool; cookies will continue to crisp as they cool.

Yields about 20, 2-inch cookies. 

OPTIONS

1. The only changes I made to Heidi’s original recipe were to cut the total recipe in half, use grapeseed in place of olive oil, and to swap in brown sugar for half of the maple syrup.  She suggests using spelt or AP white flour as an alternate if you cannot source WW pastry flour.
2. It looks like, in the pictures on Heidi’s recipe, that she sprinkles flaky sea salt on top of the cookies (although this is not listed in the recipe). I’m all for it.

STORE

Room temperature, air-tight, for up to 1 month.

SEASON

Year round.