In my mind, there is very little doubt that cooking is both one of life’s greatest pleasures and one of life’s greatest skills. Far too many people still cannot cook well enough. Jamie Oliver seems to agree with me.
Luckily for me, when I still only a small child my mum started teaching me how to cook. One of the first things I ever cooked by myself (of real recipes, not toast and the like) was these biscuits. They are extremely simple, and extremely tasty.
It’s quite possible to leave the chocolate chips out of this recipe altogether, in which case you’ll end up with peanut butter biscuits. You don’t need to make any other modifications to do this.
Ingredients
- 110g of peanut butter (whether it is smooth or crunchy doesn’t matter, but I prefer crunchy)
- 110g of room-temperature butter (use refrigerated butter if you like playing life on hard mode, and use margarine if you like me haunting you in your sleep)
- 200g of caster sugar (or any other sugar you like)
- 1 large egg
- 220g of self-raising flour (you can substitute plain flour for denser cookies, and gluten-free plain flour will work too if there are people in your life you like keeping alive)
- 200g of chocolate chips
Method
- Preheat oven to 160 degrees celcius (320 degrees fahrenheit, 430 degrees kelvin).
- Put the peanut butter in a large mixing bowl.
- Add the butter and sugar to the bowl, and mix together until there aren’t any lumps of butter left.
- Add the egg, and mix together.
- Add the flour and the chocolate chips, and mix together.
- Grease some oven trays if necessary (I use three trays, your trayage may vary). I have used a spray can of vegetable oil to grease in the past, but these days I just use non-stick oven trays.
- Spoon the mixture (using a teaspoon) onto the trays. The size of the balls should be about 1″ across and 0.5″ high (roughly). Leave about 3-4″ between biscuit centres. If you wanted to measure by weight, I make each biscuit around 40 grams.
- Then flatten down the biscuits slightly with a fork, creating faint lines in the top.
- Put them in the oven. The hardest part of the whole recipe is figuring out when they’re done. About 12-16 minutes is usual. 12 minutes will get you softer biscuits, 16 minutes will get you harder biscuits.
- About 5 minutes after taking them out of the oven, pry them off the trays and place them on a cooling rack.
- Enjoy!
Tips
- It’s easiest to put the mixing bowl on the scales, tare (zero) the scales, then add the ingredients by weight.
- If you don’t have a cooling rack, put the biscuits back on the oven tray upside-down. The idea is to let the moisture out of the biscuits so they will be chewy and crunchy instead of soft and floppy.