Peanut Butter Cookies and Then Some

When your Mom tells people about the cookies you make and asks for the recipe—you know you've found something good. That's these cookies. Super easy (I first made them when I was 15, people!) and contain few ingredients and you probably already have them in your kitchen (and if you haven't gathered, I love what I call "back of the pantry cooking"—if you can, cook with what you got! I once made white chocolate chip, ginger, apple, and oatmeal cookies from leftovers. Long name yes, but awesome).

Easy Peanut Butter Cookies

Ingredients

·         1 cup peanut butter (crunchy or creamy but crunchy gives it a better texture in my opinion)

·         1 cup sugar

·         1 egg

·         1tsp vanilla

Instructions

1.       Preheat oven to 350 and grease your baking sheet

2.       Combine all ingredients

3.       Once everything's well mixed, it's time to form your cookies. Take your cooking spray (or a dap of cooking oil) and spray it on your hands to keep the dough from sticking to them. Take a spoonful full and roll between your palms to form a smooth ball—don't use your fingers to form the ball, this will just make the dough stick to you! Trust me.

4.       Once you place all your dough balls on the baking sheet (about an inch apart should be good) squish them down with three of your fingers (think the hand sign from Hunger Games)—this makes the cookies look better when they're done.

5.       Bake for about 10 minutes. Want chewy-er cookies? Bake a little less. I prefer them on the crunchy side for some reason. Either way, they fantastically melt in your mouth with each bite.

Another thing about these cookies? They're pretty good about holding their shape, like here when I made them for a friend's birthday and spelt out her name (they do spread in the baking though!)

 Tana, if you're reading this, I used a picture of you, hope you don't mind.

Want to add some more flavor to the cookies? Follow the recipe above but instead of 1 cup peanut butter, make it ¾ peanut butter and ¼ Nutella. Not 100% sure what I think about them, the hubby liked them but boys are always more accepting of food (unless it's healthy) than girls are in my experience. The peanut butter and hazelnut flavors (Nutella AKA I can't believe it's not chocolate) mellow each other out so it's not an overwhelming cookie—but I'm still figuring out my toaster oven in our French Apartment so cookies got a bit burnt for me to fairly judge them.

The cookies are already dark thanks to the Nutella, so they're not going to "brown" during the baking.

Later the Hubby decided to do even more playing with the leftover dough, so we added

1 banana

~3/4 cup oats

~1-1 ½ tbsp flour (to thicken up the dough)

This definitely changed the texture of the cookies, they were softer and had that typical oatmeal cookie appearance but were delicious! The banana took over flavor-wise, but if you had the full batter (we'd already baked some cookies at this point remember) you'd probably get a bit more from the peanut butter and Nutella; you'll also probably won't need the flour to thicken the dough but you may want more oats.

Try 'em out and let me know which you think's the best!