Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies

Emma here. Spring skiing is just around the corner. My dad, sister, and I are heading up to the mountains of Tahoe for some much anticipated slope time. At 11 a.m. this morning I was already packed and ready to go, so I decided to make some cookies for the road. We have had a lot of chocolate chip cookies at our house lately, and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with chocolate chip cookies, I decided it was time to switch it up a bit. (On a side note, if you would like to check out the best chocolate chip cookie recipe in the world, look no further than Not Without Salt’s “the last chocolate chip cookie…”.)

Today, I branched out a bit and made peanut butter cookies. The result: delicious and fairly wholesome. They are soft and peanut-y, but also satisfyingly sweet. The dough stuck together very well, much better than other vegan cookie recipes I have experimented with.

Peanut Butter Cookies (vegan):

1 cup flour (you can use any combination; I used 3/4 cup white and 1/4 cup buckwheat, may up it to half and half next time)

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp sea salt

1/2 cup peanut butter (I used Trader Joe’s Crunchy Salted)

1/2 cup maple syrup

3/4 tsp vanilla

1/8 cup milk

1 tbsp olive oil (Increase this amount if your peanut butter isn’t very oily, I had just opened a new can)

Turbinado sugar for sprinkling on top

*Adapted from 17 and baking.

Combine peanut butter, maple syrup, milk, vanilla, and olive oil in a bowl. Sift flour, baking soda, and salt on top and then stir until just combined.

Chill dough for 10 minutes, and then place tablespoon size dollops of dough onto a cookie sheet. Flatten with a fork and sprinkle sugar on top.

Bake for 9 minutes until golden brown. Once the cookies are out of the oven, allow them to cool on the baking sheet for 1 minute before transferring to a cooling rack. I know, I know. That one minute feels like a lifetime. But it is worth it, unless you like cleaning multitudes of cookie crumbs off of the flour. At the moment, half of our cookies are on a plate for my mom’s sewing class, and the other half stowed in a cooler ready for the road. Squaw Valley, here we come!