RECIPE: Peanut Butter Cookies, and Almond Failures.

PEANUT BUTTER CRISSCROSS COOKIES - 400 F oven
  1 cup shortening
  1 cup peanut butter
  1 cup granulated sugar
  1 cup (packed) brown sugar
  2 eggs
  1 teaspoon vanilla
  2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  1 teaspoon baking soda
  Dash salt

  Preheat oven to 400 F.

  Cream together shortening and peanut butter.  Gradually add
sugars, blending well.  Add egs, one at a time, beating until
smooth.  Add vanilla.  Set aside.

  Combine flour, baking soda, and salt.  Stir into peanut butter
mixture.

  Using dampened hands, shape batter into 1-inch balls and place 2
inches apart on a greased cookie sheet.  Flatten with a fork in a
crisscross pattern, then bake for about 8 minutes.

  Yield: approximately 6 dozen cookies.

  [The Great American Peanut Butter Book, Larry & Honey Zisman, St.
Martin's Press, New York, 1985.]

[To measure shortening, put a cup of water in a 2-cup glass
measuring cup; then add shortening until it reaches the 2-cup line.
Pour out the water, and scrape the shortening into your mixing bowl.]

[I found it easier to flour my hands, not dampen them.]
[This recipe uses three of my big cookie sheets.]
[Mind that cooking time, as they can burn on the bottom easily.]

[To fake out a 9-year-old who thinks she "doesn't like peanut butter
cookies" -- don't crisscross them with the fork. When they come out
of the oven, put an unwrapped chocolate kiss in the center of each one.
She liked them, even though she "doesn't like peanut butter cookies."]

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So how do we get from a standard pb-cookie recipe to "Almond
Failures?"  Well, here are a few things I've determined from two
passes at this recipe.

First of all, if you want almond cookies instead of pb cookies, you
just substitute almond butter for peanut butter.  Working with
almond butter can be a bit tricky.  Like your "gourmet" or "natural"
peanut butters, the Trader Joes almond butter doesn't have anything
added to keep it from separating, so you need to stir it up.  Don't
drain off the oil!  You'll wind up with the driest, hardest, nut
substance imaginable.

But, unlike most peanut butters, the almond butter comes in a
plastic tub, with not much room to stir it around.  So my first
order of business was to get a glass container approximately twice
the volume, and decant the almond butter and stir it up there.  I
used a knife - easiest to cut the almond blocks into bits to let the
almond oil mix - and I was able to use that same knife for most of
my cooking.

Substituting almond butter for peanut butter is a straight-forward
matter.  The two times I've made these cookies, however, I've goofed
on the quantities.  (When everything's one-cup at a time and I use
a 1/2-cup measure, I trip up somewhere along the way.)  The cookie
recipe is pretty durable, though - you may get something gloppy or
otherwise of the wrong texture, but the only thing that will RUIN
the batch is too much salt.

What's a dash of salt?  Half a cup?  No, that's too much.  My wife
has told me 1/16 tsp.  On my most recent run-through, I eyeballed
it in the palm of my hand, and that was my mistake.  I got salty
cookies!  Uggh.

There's something else to keep in mind with this recipe.  These
cookies are a "make them all at once" type of recipe.  I made one
sheet full (15 cookies) and decided I didn't want to stay up all
night rolling out cookies, so I made a "roll" out of the batch,
wrapped it in waxed paper, and fridged it.  This was my second
mistake.  I have since then found that once chilled, the dough
doesn't really want to ball up.  (Or is that because of the excess
salt?)  I'm cooking them up anyway, in the toaster oven (5 at a
time), but they have a tendency to crumble before & after cooking.
I've tried slicing off cookies, I've tried rolling them into balls,
it doesn't work.  It's not that kind of recipe.

I understand that some cookie doughs can be rolled into balls, and
then refrigerated or frozen.  I don't know if that would have
worked.  The reason I tried what I did is because I didn't want to
roll them all, not because I didn't want to cook them at once.

Next time I'm going to make a "drop" cookie, i.e. where the dough
is gloppy enough to just scoop and plop onto the cookie sheet!

June 1991, March 1994

Hazel Boston-Baden, P.O. Box 17522, Anaheim CA 92817.
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