The World’s Best Easy Peanut Butter Cookies are soft and chewy, and made with just 3 ingredients: peanut butter, brown sugar and egg. Devilishly moorish, these truly taste of peanut butter and you may never forgive me for introducing this to you!
3 ingredient desserts are handy emergency recipes, like Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars. Everybody loves them and they’re so quick to make!
Peanut Butter Cookies
Having dictated this recipe to 3 people at the dog park in the past week, and having had all 3 approach me afterwards with varying forms of love/hate gestures (“THIS is YOUR FAULT!” one lady wailed, showing me her stomach 😉 ), I decided I had better move this up the posting schedule.
3 ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies are not a new thing, certainly not my invention. I’ve no idea how long they’ve been around for, but what I do know is that every recipe I have seen calls for peanut butter, an egg and WHITE sugar.
It is quite amazing, how much difference it makes just switching white for brown sugar. While I’d never turn down a 3 ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies made with white sugar, they are quite crumbly and crisp. The texture is not really to my taste, and I do feel it’s one of those 3 ingredient recipes where you are compromising on quality quite a bit for the sake of convenience.
But use brown sugar instead… and wow! The difference is astonishing. The cookie is soft and chewy and it has more flavour too, that slight caramel-y flavour that brown sugar has.
Here’s my attempt to capture how chewy and soft these cookies are!
How to make Peanut Butter Cookies
Mix 1 cup peanut butter (the commercial spread stuff, not pure peanut butter), 1 cup brown sugar, 1 egg, flatten 1 tbsp balls on tray, bake 10 minutes at 350F / 180C.
Yes, it’s really that easy!
And here’s a peek into the inside. It’s not dense and gluey which one might expect because they are flourless.
Peanut butter lovers, this recipe is dangerous knowledge to have, especially because it’s so ridiculously simple to remember.
1, 1, 1, 10
1 cup peanut butter.
1 cup brown sugar.
1 egg.
Bake 10 minutes.
It’s stuck in your head now, isn’t it? Go, go! Go make these now! – Nagi x
For the Peanut Butter Obsessed
Peanut Butter Caramel Pie – dangerously easy, outrageously decadent
Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars – just 3 ingredients!
And for Cookie Monsters 🙋🏻♀️
Byron Bay copycat cookies – Choc Chunk, White Choc Macadamia and Chewy Choc Fudge
Watch how to make it
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World’s Best Easy Peanut Butter Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup / 265 g peanut butter , smooth or crunchy – commercial spread, NOT pure peanut butter (I use Bega) (Note 1)
- 200 g/ 1 cup , packed, brown sugar (Note 2)
- 1 egg
Instructions
- Place ingredients in a bowl and mix to combine. It will be soft, too soft for scooping. Refrigerate for 10 minutes.
- Meanwhile, preheat oven to 180C / 350F (standard) or 160C/320F (fan / convection).
- Line 2 trays with parchment paper.
- Place 1 tbsp scoops of the dough onto the trays (I use a cookie scoop) 5cm/2″ apart.
- Dip a large fork in a bowl of hot tap water (stops fork sticking to dough). Press down on the dough, then press 90 degrees the other way (watch video) so the cookie is 1 cm / 2/5″ thick. Re-dip fork in water as required.
- Put both trays in the oven and bake for 10 minutes, swapping the trays halfway through, or until light golden on the surface and golden on the edges. (Or longer if you want crisper cookies)
- Leave to cool on the tray. Store in an airtight container for up to 4 – 5 days.
Recipe Notes:
Nutrition Information:
LIFE OF DOZER
He was so focussed on the peanut butter cookie in my hand, he didn’t realise I left the other half on his head when I gave him a pat….. 😂 SO MEAN!!!!
Excellent recipe, extremely tasty, love it
I accidentally bought a no sugar added peanut butter that my family won’t eat so I use in cooking. I think that made these cookies perfect!
Hi Nagi 🖐 could i add milk chocolate choc chips to these? 😊
When I make these, I make 3 batches at a time. I leave one batch plain, the second batch I dip half the biscuit in dark or milk chocolate, depending who they are for. And the last batch I melt Reese’s peanut butter chips with milk chocolate. I found the Reese’s peanut butter chips at Woolworth’s in Australia
Loved this but found it a bit too sweet when I followed the recipe. I made it again a little less sweet by reducing sugar to 150g (3/4 cup) and adding 2tsp flour.
What a simple recipe, and my husband and son loved them. I didn’t care for them myself, and I’m the peanut butter cookie lover! I thought I didn’t bake them long enough, so I increased the time, they still tasted like I was eating partially raw dough…. I made a batch with crunchy and a batch with smooth. The crunchy looked thicker, like it didn’t need refrigerated, but did. The smooth definitely needed chilled, but at the end of the day, neither one of them baked up right. I even used brand new oven temp gauges to make sure my ovens were heating up to temp. I do love me a bit of a crisper, but not HARD, cookie. I’m rating a 5 because the other 2 in the house really, really liked them.
Can you substitute brown sugar for coconut sugar?
I tweaked these to cater for a diabetic, and also followed Karin’s advice about how she had changed them using less sugar.
I used only half cup of Stevia, added 2 teaspoons of sifted cacao powder, a tablespoon of the last from the Tahini jar, 100gms of chopped sugar-free chocolate, and 2 tablespoons of almond meal. The almond meal helped bind everything together really well, while still keeping it low carb. I didn’t need to refrigerate it as it was thick enough.
They turned out beautifully; lovely and fudgy inside. I had to let them cool completely before moving them, as they were very soft straight out of the oven.
Love this easy recipe!
Yay, another 5 star wonder! I have made so many batches of these that I am starting to resemble a peanut butter cookie. I’ve been experimenting with healthier versions and think I have the quantities down pat for anyone who may be interested:
-1 cup of crunchy peanut butter (I use the healthy version with just peanuts and let’s face it, life is too short for smooth peanut butter)
-half a cup of brown sugar
-2-3 teaspoons of pure/unsweetened cacao powder (which you need to “dry up” the dough as it’s too liquidy when you reduce the sugar – mix in 2 tsp first and add a third if it’s still too sticky)
-a couple of rows of good quality dark cooking chocolate roughly chopped (optional for most but mandatory in my home as I take my antioxidants very seriously obviously!)
They will turn out a bit darker because of the cacao powder but they’re really yum and just a tad healthier so you can eat more of them! It usually makes about 13 bikkies with the chocolate added and it’s crunchy on the outside and slightly chewy on the inside with Nagi’s suggested 10 mins of baking time, which is perfect!
P.S. Oh goodness, and of course the egg also, which I forgot to mention!!
These were a little too sweet for me. Can I reduce the sugar?
Hi Nagy.
Could I use almond butter instead of peanut butter?
Hi Nagi, just wondering could the sugar be switched to monkfruit sweetener?
I have a very similar cookie scoop as yours (shown in the video) and the recipe yielded about 28 cookies not 14. This would make sense because 1 Tb of dough weighs about 15-20 grams and the recipe dough has a total mass of about 515 grams. 515 divided by the weight of 1 Tb of dough will give you an average of 25-34 cookies. Thank you for sharing!
These are amazing! So easy and so delicious. Thanks for always having such reliably yummy recipes x
Can these cookies be frozen?
Really,really easy and delicous, Good idea Nagi!
Hi Nagi, I was wondering, if I use 3/4 or 1/2 cup of sugar instead, will it affect the texture of the cookie? And i had another idea, what if I completely skip the sugar to make dog-friendly cookies? Will it affect the texture then?
Hi Kaitlyn, yes changing the quantities is faint to affect the texture sorry! N x
These are delicious and I’ve been making a version of these cookies for quite awhile. I add a half cup of unsweetened shredded coconut and a half teaspoon of curry powder for a rich warm flavor. Sometimes I add chocolate chips as well.
The only problem with these cookies is they’re so simple to make and I always have these ingredients on hand so it’s too easy to make whenever I crave something sweet! They were just delightful and even better the day after I thought. Yum! Thanks Nagi
Sigh… I tried making these again because I really want to get this right. But again they came out super flat, crispy, candy-like, lace cookie. What am I doing wrong? Maybe I’m not chilling it long enough? I did chill it for 10 minutes in the fridge but the dough was still really soft. Maybe I should be chilling the dough overnight? Help! 🙂
Oh no, sorry you’re having issues, can you tell me what type of peanut butter you’re using?? N x
Hi Nagi! I’m using light peanut butter. Not the natural stuff though, still has the sugar and salt in it, just a bit less calories. Should I chill the dough more? Or use full fat peanut butter? Someone said they used natural pb which is runnier than light and it still worked for her! I’m stumped.