Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookie Recipe from The Food Charlatan. (2024)

FAQs

Why are my 3 ingredient peanut butter cookies falling apart? ›

There are a few reasons why your cookies are falling apart. The wrong ratio of ingredients, such as too little sugar or peanut butter will make them fall apart. The wrong type of peanut butter may cause them to fall apart. Or using old eggs may create crumbly cookies.

Chill your cookie dough! The dough is extremely soft due to the creamy peanut butter, eggs, and butter and if it's not cold going into the oven, the cookies will spread all over your baking sheet. I chilled this cookie dough for 24 hours and my cookies were soft, thick perfection.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

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.

Ostensibly “regular” peanut butter, with its added emulsifiers, sweeteners, and hydrogenated oils, will contaminate your cookies' flavor with its weird artificiality. Your other source of fat should be butter, not shortening.

Firm dough prevents the cookies from spreading too much, which is why chilling the dough is a crucial step for cut-out and rolled cookies. "The colder and more solid the fat is, the less the cookie will spread," says food stylist and recipe developer Caitlin Haught Brown.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.

We prefer natural peanut butter here, so you can dial in the sugar and salt amounts precisely, and smooth peanut butter over crunchy to better control the cookies' fat and moisture levels. Letting the cookie dough rest ensures the flour is fully hydrated, resulting in crisper edges and chewier middles.

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.

The reason is that peanut butter cookie dough is dense, and unpressed, each cookie will not cook evenly. Using a fork to press the dough is a convenience of tool; bakers can also use a cookie shovel (spatula).

What is the best peanut butter for baking cookies? ›

Peanut butter: Creamy peanut butter is ideal for this recipe because crunchy peanut butter creates an overly crumbly cookie. You can use processed peanut butter such as Jif or Skippy, or natural-style peanut butter.

If you're wanting to use natural (no sugar added) peanut butter, the cookies will be less sweet and they will likely spread out more. Using natural peanut butter will change the structure and texture of the cookies. Why are my cookies dry and crumbly? This is most likely a classic case of using too much flour.

According to baking site Creme de la Crumb, if you find your cookies to be crumbly, it is because you've used too much flour. The site notes that it's an easy mistake to make, especially for us rookies who might think moist-looking cookie dough is a problem.

Creating Cookie Doughs

Cookie doughs are made with basic ingredients including sugar, fat, flour, eggs, and other leavening agents including baking powder or baking soda.

Use more granulated sugar than brown sugar.

With all of the peanut butter in this cookie dough, however, too much brown sugar made the cookies so soft that they fell apart.

Why are my cookies dry and crumbly? This is most likely a classic case of using too much flour. It's crucial to properly measure the flour in this recipe, as even 1 extra tablespoon of flour can completely change the structure of the cookies. You also might have over baked them!

Reasons why peanut butter cookies are dry and crumbly:

You cooked them a wee bit too long. Peanut butter cookies can be extremely deceiving. They don't always look cooked when, indeed, they are fully cooked. They won't get brown around the edges.

Why are my peanut butter cookies falling apart? For most peanut butter cookies, it could mean you have too much flour in the dough. But since the cookie has no flour, it means you baked them too long.