Gluten-Free Peanut Butter Cookies

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These peanut butter cookies are a tried-and-tested recipe whose dough comes together in the time it takes your oven to preheat. All you need is one bowl and a spatula and it’s as easy as throwing your ingredients into a bowl, mixing, scooping, flattening, and baking.

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💕 Here’s Why These Cookies Are Amazing:

• These cookies take 20 minutes to make from start to finish.
• They are clean-eating and gluten-free.
• They’re made with coconut sugar, a low GI sugar, means that these cookies are not cloyingly sweet and have notes of caramel undertones.
• The use of natural peanut butter ensures that the peanut flavor is both highlighted and celebrated.
• The cookies are soft right out of the oven but once they cool, they turn into this wonderfully chewy sweet treat.

Trust me, you’ll be coming back to this recipe time and time again.

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To Make Them We’ll Need the Following Ingredients:

• Natural peanut butter: ie- peanut butter that only contains peanut and possibly a touch of salt but nothing else.
• Coconut Sugar: this low GI sweetener adds a great flavor to the cookie.
• Blanched almond flour: Ensure you’re using a super fine blend. You can also use unblanched almond flour (aka almond meal), just note that the texture of the cookie may be slightly grainier.
• Egg: cold or room temp works just fine.
• Vanilla extract: this gives a great depth of flavor to our cookie.
• Salt: I’m using a Pink Himalayan but you can also use sea salt.
• Baking powder: this touch of a rising agent helps with the cookie’s texture and set once it has baked and cooled.

Now a note about the sugar, I highly recommend using the coconut sugar because it is slightly less sweet than raw cane sugar and it also imparts a beautiful almost caramel/molasses-like flavor to the cookie. If you opt to use raw cane sugar I would suggest you reduce the amount, since using the same amount as the recipe calls for will result in a too-sweet cookie in my view.

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Let Me Show You How Insanely Easy These Cookies Are the Make:

Into a large bowl goes our peanut butter, coconut sugar, salt and vanilla extract. Mix it together until all ingredients are combined.

Then add your egg. You can also whisk your egg in a separate bowl before adding it to the dough to ensure that it is fully blended together.

Combine your egg into the dough, being sure that no bits of egg are left whole or visible. Using the back of your spatula to smear and break down any bits of egg into the dough works really well for this step!

Honestly at this point you, in essence, have a peanut butter cookie dough. The famous three-ingredient peanut butter cookie calls for peanut butter, sugar and an egg. We’ve already gone a step ahead by adding in the vanilla extract, but in my opinion, using the dough as it is will not make a cookie that has the texture we’re after. For that we need to go just one step further…

Add in your almond flour and baking powder. As a substitute, you can also use coconut flour in place of almond flour if you enjoy the texture and flavor of it. If subbing coconut flour for almond flour, use half the amount called for in the recipe.

As you can see in the image above, the dough is firm, and because of that it doesn’t need to be chilled which means that you can go right into portioning and baking your cookies! Honestly, there’s nothing that bums me out more than having a cookie craving and finding out that the recipe I’m following requires the dough to be chilled for a few hours. 😩

Using a tablespoon measure, scoop out equal portions of your dough onto a parchment-lined baking tray. You should get between 12-14 cookie mounds. I really recommend using the parchment paper or a baking mat since it will keep the bottoms from browning (or burning) too quickly while the top and middle are still uncooked.

Have you ever wondered why peanut butter cookies have that iconically pressed cross-hatch pattern? The reason for it is that the dough itself is rather heavy and stiff and because of that it doesn’t melt or spread out on it’s own like most cookies do, so for it to have that flat cookie-shape a little help is needed!

Using the flat back of a fork, gently press down on your rounds to make an imprint and then slide your fork back towards you. Rotate your fork 90 degrees, like you’re making an X, and press and slide your fork down once more to create the cross hatch.

Once done, pop your tray of cookies into your preheated oven for 10-12 minutes. You did remember to preheat your oven, didn’t you?

Since they’re a bit darker in color it might be difficult to tell when they’re done especially since they bake up soft but harden as they cool. You can however check them by gently prodding the edge, if it’s soft to the point of leaving an indent they’re not ready yet, if however, they seem firm and you might even be able to notice if the edges are slightly browned then they’re good to go. Another sort-of indicator is going to be your nose. Usually once my kitchen fills up with the smell of the cookies I know they’re almost done and just need a few more minutes. Nonetheless, keep an eye on them once you’re nearing that ten minute mark, they can go from done to burned very quickly so don’t walk away!

Once your cookies are removed from the oven they will be soft (which might make you think they’re not done baking) but simply let them rest on the baking tray and as they cool they will begin to harden to the point where you can pick them up.

The final step is the most important one: Enjoy your delicious cookies! 🍪

Did you make this recipe? If you did be sure to share your pics and don’t forget to tag us on social media (@kitrusycleaneat or #kitrusy) so we can fawn over them together! 🤤