Archive for: peanut butter
A fluffernutter is a sandwich that is filled with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff or marshmallow cream. The combination of sweet and salty works extremely well, making this gooey sandwich a favorite of just about any kid who has even had one. It’s the kind of thing that I don’t necessarily eat on a regular basis as an adult, but I still can’t resist the combination when it comes up and get a craving for it every now and then. These Fluffernutter Whoopie Pies are inspired by this delicious sandwich.
The whoopie pies have cake-like rounds of peanut butter cookies as their foundation, and they are filled with a mixture of marshmallow cream and peanut butter. You get a great peanut butter flavor and the marshmallow adds just the right amount (which is to say, quite a bit) of sweetness to make the whoopie pie exactly what you would expect to get from a fluffernutter. The peanut butter cake/cookies are actually quite good on their own, and they stand up well to the filling. You can use smooth peanut butter, but I prefer to use crunchy so that there is a little bit more texture in these.
Regular, national brand peanut butters work well for both the cake and the filling, since they tend to have a good salty-sweet balance. Natural peanut butters also work, but tend to get a little bit gooey in the filling since they have a softer texture, so you might want to pack a few extra napkins. The marshmallow fluff also gets a bit messy in the filling – although I tend to think that it is part of the fun of eating a fluffernutter! – so I recommend filling these just before you intend to serve them. The cookies will keep very well when stored in an airtight container, so you can even make those a day or two in advance and fill them at the last minute.
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A peanut butter cup is nothing more than chocolate enrobing a salty-sweet peanut butter center in a small paper cup. This version of a peanut butter cup is still in “cup” format, albeit a larger cupcake size! These Peanut Butter Cup Chocolate Cupcakes should appeal to anyone whose mouth waters at the thought of a peanut butter cup and doesn’t mind a supersized package.
These are chocolate cupcakes topped with salty-sweet peanut butter and chocolate frostings. The cupcake recipe is a great basic chocolate cupcake that has a very strong chocolate flavor and a wonderful dark, decadent-looking color to it. They’re moist and tender, and good enough to go with any type of frosting you could want to put on top, even though they do go especially well with peanut butter. For the frosting, I used a national peanut butter brand (JIF) and got great results. Make sure to taste-test your frosting while you’re making it, since the frosting should have a hint of salt and you might need to add in a pinch if your peanut butter is a low salt variety.
When I was putting these together, I considered putting the peanut butter filling in the center of the cupcakes and topping them only with chocolate frosting to make them look like a regular peanut butter cup. When I did that, I found that I wanted more peanut butter than I could fit in the cupcake, so I switched to a thick layer of peanut butter frosting on top of the cake. This way, you get peanut butter cup flavors that are in better balance – and that means that you will have peanut butter and chocolate in every single bite of cake that you take.
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This is an ice cream for peanut butter lovers. Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream is a rich peanut butter ice cream that has a swirl of chocolate shavings running through it, delivering a great chocolate-peanut butter flavor with creamy ice cream and a slight crunch from the chocolate. It is addictive – and might be even more addictive than the peanut butter cup candies that inspired this flavor combination.
The ice cream starts out with an easy to make peanut butter base. Use a peanut butter that you like the flavor of for this recipe, because you are really going to taste it in the finished product. I used an all natural national brand (Jif All Natural) that I frequently use for baking. There are no eggs in the ice cream base because the peanut butter adds a lot of thickness to the mixture, and plenty of fat to keep the finished ice cream ultra-smooth and scoopable. I also used honey as the sweetener here because it goes so well with peanut butter, and it is easy to whisk in to the no-cook ice cream base.
I churned the peanut butter ice cream in my ice cream maker (and yes, you will want an ice cream maker for the best results with this recipe), then added in the chocolate. Ice cream churned in an ice cream maker typically needs to be frozen after churning to fully firm up, and transferring it from the machine to a storage container is the perfect time to add any mix-ins to a batch of homemade ice cream.
I didn’t want to use chocolate chips in this ice cream because I don’t like big, hard chunks of frozen chocolate in my ice cream (standard chocolate chips are just too big). So instead, I shaved a bunch of milk chocolate into chocolate curls, then layered those very thin pieces of chocolate with the ice cream as I scooped it out of the ice cream maker and into a freezer-safe container to firm up. I used a lot of chocolate shavings in between the layers of ice cream, and the result was not only a great peanut butter and chocolate combination, but also a beautiful chocolate swirl in my ice cream. I used milk chocolate, but you can use milk or dark. I think that shaving the chocolate into rough curls is a fast and easy way to break the chocolate down into small pieces and they have a great texture, but finely chopping the chocolate is an alternative that will work here, too.
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Peanut butter cookies are usually a great candidate for using whole wheat flour, even if you’re not usually a big fan of using whole wheat flours in baking. Whole wheat flour has a stronger flavor than regular all purpose flour does, and in some types of cookies, that flavor can sort of take over the cookie and hide the more delicate flavors of butter and sugar. In the case of peanut butter cookies, the peanut butter is strongly flavored enough that the flavor of whole wheat comes through as an extra nuttiness in the finished cookies that can make them even tastier – as well as making them a little bit better for you.
These Whole Wheat Peanut Butter Cookies are made using only whole grain flour. You can use white whole wheat flour or regular whole wheat flour to make these cookies. I prefer to use white whole wheat, which has a slightly milder flavor to it, but both will give you good results. The cookies are tender, but still chewy, and they have a great peanut butter flavor. They also keep very well, so one batch can last quite a while when stored in an airtight container.
You can use either plain or crunchy peanut butter in these, based on your personal preference. It’s good both ways, but it is nice to have those little chunks of peanut in there to add a little extra texture. I typically use a national brand of peanut butter – such as Jif – when making these cookies, but all natural peanut butter will also work if that is what you have on hand. Natural peanut butter cookies may spread slightly more than these, so give your cookies a little more space on the baking sheet so that they don’t run together in the oven.
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These Cocoa Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies are some of the easiest peanut butter cookies that you’ll ever make. They’re based on my Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies and use no flour or butter in them, unlike regular peanut butter cookies, and are primarily made with peanut butter, eggs and sugar. The first time you try them, you might be a bit skeptical about how they’ll work, but I can assure you that this is an easy recipe that you’ll find yourself returning to again and again.
This variation on the basic flourless peanut butter cookies adds a little bit of chocolate into the mix. I used unsweetened cocoa powder to lend some chocolate flavor to the peanut butter, giving them a peanut butter cup-like flavor – and the addition of a generous amount of chocolate chips doesn’t hurt either! The cookies are more tender than a regular peanut butter cookie but still have a nice chewiness to them. Under baking them slightly will give you a chewier finished product, and letting them go an extra minute or two will produce a crisper cookie.
I like to use smooth peanut butter in these cookies, but crunchy peanut butter can be used instead if that is what you have on hand. The little pieces of peanut add nice crispy elements to the cookies, and work well with the chocolate chips. The cookies keep very well and can be stored in an airtight container for several days after baking.
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