peanut butter cookies : 4 ingredients

Life is too short for bad ______. Fill in the blank. A good motto, and a wise friend recently filled in the blank with a word near and dear to my heart (and digestive tract): cookies.

Time is also often too short to make cookies at home, which is one reason I ALWAYS have dough in the freezer. But these little cookies are some of the best of their kind, and they take about 5 minutes to come together and ten minutes to bake. 

Peanut butter cookies...a darling of the American pastry tradition. They come with chocolate, with a jelly thumbprint, with ice cream sandwiched between, you name it. But they're just as delicious in their plain, unadorned state.  So here's my standard peanut butter cookie recipe, which I found a good decade ago in Gourmet magazine.

Also, in honor of my Spanish-speaking, metric-measuring readers, I've translated and converted the recipe. See directly below the English recipe. Podeís encontrar la mantequilla de cacahuete en chinos, supermercados grandes, y tiendas latinas donde se suele llamar de maní en vez de cacahuete.

peanut butter cookies

• 1 cup peanut butter (creamy or chunky)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Preheat oven to 350°F. and grease baking sheets. Beat together peanut butter and sugar until combined well. Lightly beat egg and beat into peanut butter mixture with baking soda until combined well.

Roll level teaspoons of dough into balls and arrange about 1 inch apart on baking sheets. With tines of a fork flatten balls to about 1 1/2 inches in diameter, making a crosshatch pattern. Bake cookies in batches in middle of oven until puffed and pale golden, about 10 minutes.

cookies de mantequilla de cacahuete

• 260 g mantequilla de cacahuete
• 200 g azucar
• 1 huevo
• 1 cucharadita bicarbonato

Calentar el horno a 175°. Mezclar la mantequilla de cacahuete y azucar hasta que sea homogeneo. Añadir el huevo, batido, y el bicarbonato y mezclar.

Formar bolas de masa de 3cm mas o menos. Poner en una bandeja del horno con papel. Con el tenedor, aplastar las bolas, dar una vuelta de 90º y repetir, formando una almohadilla. Hornear durante 10 minutos, hasta que se doren un poco.