Recipe: PB&J Crumble Bar Cookies (2024)

FAQs

How do you keep peanut butter cookies from 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.

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.

Unlike many other cookies, peanut butter biscuits only fully harden once they've been removed from the oven. Here's how to tell when peanut butter cookies are done: The tops of the cookies are a uniform light brown. They're soft to the touch but not moist or mushy.

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.

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.

There are several reasons why the cookies may have become dry and crumbly but the two most likely are that either the cookies were baked for too long or too much flour was added to the dough. The cookie should be baked only until the edges are slightly golden and the top looks a little wrinkled.

Add more liquid ingredients in small amounts. Milk, egg yolks or egg whites, vanilla extract or even a teaspoon of water can help moisten the dough to give you less crumbly cookies. A little bit of a liquid like milk can also help your cookies spread in the oven to give you a more crispy cookie.

Basic reason..the dough is more dense than most cookie doughs, and the pressing with the fork tines helps the dough bake evenly. Secondarily, its pattern makes it easier to tell them apart from other cookies with similar appearance.

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.

What is the secret to soft cookies? ›

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

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.

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.

The most common mistake with peanut butter cookies is using the wrong type of peanut butter. The BEST peanut butter for today's cookies is a processed creamy peanut butter, preferably Jif or Skippy.

Oven temperatures are a crucial factor in baking. If your cookies consistently come out flat, you may have selected the wrong baking temperature. If you bake cookies using too much heat, the fats in the dough begin to melt before the other ingredients can cook together and form your cookie's rise.

Luckily, there's a solution besides dumping it down the drain, trying to mix it with a spoon, or going back to buying peanut spread: Store the jar upside down. The oil will trickle to the bottom of the jar, and the peanut solids will stay on top.

If your cookies consistently come out flat, you may have selected the wrong baking temperature. If you bake cookies using too much heat, the fats in the dough begin to melt before the other ingredients can cook together and form your cookie's rise.

Plastic wrap each cookie. For added protection against bumps and bangs, take individually wrapped cookies and double wrap them back-to-back. Use an airtight container for packing the cookies. Line the bottom of the container with a cushioning material, such as bubble wrap or Kraft paper.