A little sweet tooth anyone?

What is the essence of a great peanut butter cookie. Really think hard on this one. Times up! Well if you are a fan of the peanut butter cookie you would have answered peanut butter of course! The whole reason we eat these things is that they are a vehicle to get peanut buttery goodness into out mouths without looking like complete lunatics. Who among us takes a spoonful of peanut butter and just eats it in the presence of company? Don't raise your hands I know who you are if you do!

Let us deconstruct the peanut butter cookie in all it's glory and then think about how to make it more moist, more peanut buttery, easier, and way more gluten-free. 

Let's begin with the traditional recipe shall we?

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unsalted butter
• 1 cup crunchy peanut butter
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

This is your run of the mill peanut butter cookie. Looks like a lot of time and effort and oh yeah...for those of us who CANNOT have WHEAT this one's definitely a killer! But in being fair let's take a look anyhow. 

1 C. Butter - Most things are better with butter. Those of us trying to watch our hourglass figures it means disaster! Here's the breakdown. 
1 Cup = 2 Sticks = 16Tbs = 1600 Calories. Think about it. Besides peanut butter is already choc-ful-o oil.

1 C. Crunchy Peanut Butter - Sounds good to me. But I like mine mixed half crunchy half creamy. Personal preference. 

1 C. White Sugar - I can go for this but just white sugar? Where is the caramel undertones of brown sugar? Bland.

1 C. Brown Sugar - There it is! Whoa! Can we say don't feed these to children as they may turn into Gremlins? Way too much sugar! 

2 1/2 C. AP Flour - Need I say more? 

2 Eggs - Good. They add moisture and a little body to your cookie.

The rest is just some leavening agents and I really don't feel like getting into a chemistry lesson right now. 

So ask yourself how can we make this gluten-free and taste good? How is it a cookie without flour of any sort? Let's get to it. 

We already discovered that peanut butter is choc-ful-o oil remember? So we omit the butter. I know, you can scream heresy at me later. We leave the peanut butter alone because it looks like a good amount. Seriously 2 cups of sugar? We need to change that because we really do want to taste the peanut butter;. We are going to half that. Don't worry they will be plenty sweet enough...trust me. We will make the sugar half and half. One half will be plain white sugar and the other half will be brown sugar. The white sugar will add a great sugary sweetness while the brown will add the level of caramel flavor we desire in a great peanut butter cookie! The real kicker here is that the flour really needs to go. So the question remains what will hold our little gems together? Rice flour? Tapioca starch? The answer is quite genius and simple. Oatmeal. Plain old quick-cooking oats. I use the GV brand from Walmart. The cookies really do work best with quick-cooking oats. I know that at this point you are thinking to yourselves that oats have gluten. There is so much debate about this among fellow Celiacs. Some swear them off while others like myself use them daily to substitute for body where flour is involved. I have never had a problem with them. Neither have any of the fellow groupies in my CSA group. Who knows? If you have a conviction about it don't go there; but you will never know unless you try them. Oats come in the run of the mill kind and Certified Gluten Free. The only difference is that one is 5x the price. The only thing that separates these is one is processed in a facility that processes wheat one is not. In my recipe I use only a 1/2 cup of oats. They will soak up the oil and moisture from the egg and make a flourless cookie that would fool the greatest of culinarians. I did take the amount of egg down to one egg only because there was no need for two. Our new cookies will have enough body to hold their shape so leavening agents are useless. I did however leave a pinch of salt in the recipe and added oh yeah one more killer ingredient. Banana! Add to the most awesome cookie a banana and prepare to make yourself the envy of all who come in contact with your beautiful little gems of delectable peanut butter goodness! 

So now that we have the main idea of the cookie and it's new ingredients go ahead over to the recipes page and try them out! Please feel free to leave comments! 

Till we meet again | Chris