Family Favorites - March 2018: Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (Wheat, Soy, Milk and Fish-Free, Can Be Nut-Free)

This year, I decided to list a family favorite recipe from the blog (with any adaptions that we use regularly, if applicable) on the fourth Friday or Saturday of every month.  This recipe will be one that we make quite often and that we all enjoy greatly.  This post is the third Family Favorites recipe of 2018.

If you have a recipe on your blog that you consider a family favorite that you'd like to share, please comment below with a link to the recipe, and I'll make sure to pop on over and visit your site to check it out (and leave a comment), and hopefully some of my other readers will, too.

This month's Family Favorite recipe is Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies, which is an adaption of my Peanut Butter Cookie recipe.  The awesome thing about these cookies is that they are SUPER easy and only FOUR ingredients!  Yes, FOUR!  They are also soy-free if you use all soy-free ingredients, fish, wheat and milk-free, and can be nut-free (see variations).  Any time my kids and hubby are craving cookies, this is my go-to.  They whip up in minutes, bake in minutes, are melt-in-your-mouth awesome, and they tick all the boxes flavor-wise for us.  I hope you give them a try and love them as much as we do!

(Note: The egg is crucial to this cookie, but if you wanted to try to make them egg-free, I'd suggest trying the flax "egg" on my ingredient substitutions page.  I can't guarantee they will turn out, but if you try it and they do, please let me know!)

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 large egg

1 Cup smooth, soy-free peanut butter 

(We use Jif Natural Creamy.)

1 Cup white sugar

(We always use cane sugar.)

1 Cup Enjoy Life Mini Chocolate Chips
(We always use this brand and type.)

1. Preheat oven to 350^oF.

2. Beat egg, peanut butter and sugar together until dough forms. (You can do this by hand with a wooden or metal spoon, or you can use an electric mixer.)
  
3. Stir in the chocolate chips until evenly distributed.

4. Shape the dough into small balls. (Note: The smaller you make these cookies, the crispier they are. If you make them larger, they are softer. Either way, they still melt in your mouth. :) )

5. Place balls on cookie sheet about 1 inch apart and flatten them with your hand or bottom of a glass.

6. Bake for 10 minutes. DO NOT OVER BAKE. (Note: This is crucial to these cookies!  Give them 10 minutes ONLY and pull them out.  They will burn if you cook them longer, though there are rare occasions that I have had them done in as little as 9 minutes or as long as 11 minutes, but I think that was due to the oven I was using.  That being said, if you oven cooks "hot", check them at 9 or even 8 minutes.  If your oven runs "cold", you may have to let them go until 11 or 12 minutes.  Either way, check them about 8 minutes to see if the bottom of a center cookie is light golden brown.  If it is, pull them out.  If it is not, leave it another minute, and re-check.  You should find that the time is nearly always 10 minutes.  Also, you are better off slightly under-baking this particular cookie, so err on the side of underdone if you are not sure.)

7. Remove them from the oven and allow them to cool on the baking sheet about a minute before moving them to waxed paper, brown paper (paper bags cut to lay flat is what I use) or a wire rack to cool.  (Note: These cookies are soft by nature, so they will fall apart if you try to remove them with a flimsy spatula/turner.  A metal fish spatula works well or even a clean pan scraper if you have nothing else.)

This recipe makes around 30 cookies, depending on size.

Variations:

• Nut-Free/Tree Nut Butters/Flavored Peanut Butters: If you can have seed butter, you can replace the peanut butter with that.  If you can have almond butter, cashew butter, etc., you can use one of those in place of the peanut butter, as well.  You can even try a flavored peanut butter or Nutella.  There's a lot of possibilities with this cookie, as you can see!
    
• Other Chocolates: If you can have other types of chocolate, you can try white, dark or milk chocolate or a combination of a few (just don't go over 1 Cup total).  You can even use M&Ms or chopped up candy bar (Reese's Cups, Hershey's, etc.).  So many options!

This is the perfect cookie to make when you want a treat that takes very little effort and time!

It's a great one to teach the kids how to make or have them make with you!

This is sure to become a family favorite recipe that you can enjoy and make together!
How perfect is that?

(This recipe was originally posted on my original site, Natural and Free.)