Halloween Peanut Butter Spider Cookies | Easy Cookie Recipes (2024)

FAQs

Why are my peanut butter cookies hard? ›

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.

So it looks like that there are utilitarian reasons for the cross-hatching—to allow for even cooking—but it might have been passed along for nearly a hundred years for primarily aesthetic reasons, where the cross-hatching is more to identify the cookies as peanut butter ones, rather than to cook them well.

The peanut butter cookie was invented in the 1910's, when George Washington Carver of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute published a peanut cookbook in an effort to promote the crop.

Baking powder

Baking powder contains sodium bicarbonate and acidic salts. The reaction of these two ingredients results in a cookie that is soft and thick, but slightly harder.

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.

These early recipes do not explain why the advice is given to use a fork, though. 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).

Your other source of fat should be butter, not shortening. Butter will make your cookies taste buttery; shortening will make them taste suspiciously vacant, like Katy Perry's voice post-autotune. Yes, shortening yields chewier cookies than butter does, because butter contains water and shortening doesn't.

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.

At first, peanut butter cookies were made with ground peanuts instead of peanut butter. George Washington Carver, father of peanuts, published 105 recipes for peanuts that had the first peanut cookies.

The first known cookie sales by an individual Girl Scout unit were by the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in December 1917 at their local high school.

How old is Skippy peanut butter? ›

SKIPPY® History

In 1933, Joseph Rosefield had the nutty idea to change the formula for peanut butter. He created SKIPPY® peanut butter, which was less sticky and longer-lasting. Peanut butter lovers fell in love, and spread the fun to their families and friends.

Simply lay the bread at the bottom of the container and pile your cookies on top of it, seal the lid, and wait a few hours. The cookies will soak up all the moisture from the bread and by the next morning, they will taste as good as the day they came out of the oven gooey.

Baking cookies quickly in a hot oven – at 375 degrees F as opposed to a lower temperature – will make for soft results. They'll bake fast instead of sitting and drying out in the oven's hot air. Ever so slightly underbaking your cookies will give you softer results than cooking them the full amount the recipe says.

According to The Kitchn, this occurs when you over-mix the dough. Mixing the dough naturally causes gluten to develop in the flour, and while you do need a good amount of gluten to give your cookies structure, too much of it will result in hard cookies.

the more you mix cookie dough. the more the gluten develops and they become hard and dry and an unfavorable texture.