Peanut butter cookies are a serious addiction for me. Thank heavens I don’t make them often or I’d be the size of a killer whale! Though keeping a whole jar of peanut butter aside for baking in our house is not an easy challenge. Every time I buy a jar it miraculously disappears. Both my husband and daughter love peanut butter on toast for breakfast. So on the rare occasions where I have made peanut butter cookies, they just seem to vanish in our house.
Knowing that peanut butter cookies are naughty but nice, I was interested to see that Lorraine Pascale has a lighter version in her latest book “A Lighter Way To Bake” which I am currently using as my Cooking The Books Challenge for January. Lorraine says in the recipe introduction that she has “worked hard to reduce the peanut butter, sugar and butter content in them as best as I can so that they still have that scrumbunctious flavour!” To do this Lorraine uses no added sugar peanut butter which usually has palm oil in instead. This is the peanut butter I usually buy anyway, like Whole Earth or Sainsbury’s Organic Crunchy Peanut Butter.
There isn’t any butter at all in the recipe, all the fat content comes from the peanut butter but there is a small amount of caster sugar. It would be interesting to see how the peanut butter cookies tasted when compared with regular ones.
The recipe made 12 cookies and I quickly split the dough into 12 equal balls ready to be put on the baking trays. Usually I find I don’t have to squash them or press them flat as they spread out in the oven. I didn’t read the recipe properly, Lorraine says to flatten them down with the palm of your hand. I didn’t do it, they went straight into the oven.
When the cookies came out of the oven about 10 minutes later they were cooked to the perfect golden brown colour they should have been but they didn’t look like the ones in the book. I then read the recipe properly and realised my mistake. This didn’t affect the taste of the cookies though. I was impressed with them, not too sweet and you could taste the peanuts in them without the cookies being too rich! I will definitely be making these again. I did only have one with a cup of tea, honest!
Looking at the nutritional analysis comparison chart, it says there are only about 8 calories different between the lighter and the regular one. The fat and saturated fat content has been reduced, only by about 1g but the main reduction was in the sugar content, a huge difference of about 3 grammes! I did think the cookies were very tasty though and I did have to hide them away in the cupboard so I wasn’t tempted to binge on them!
Happy Baking!
Love Sam xx
SmartCookieSam 
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