These cookies are crisp, delicious, and loaded with peanut butter flavor.  Because they contain no flour, they are gluten free, so they’re a great cookie to have in your arsenal of cookie recipes for gifting during the holidays.   I learned about these cookies from my mother.  She called me one day to ask if I had ever heard of flourless peanut butter cookies.  I hadn’t.  She read the ingredients to me and I wondered how this was supposed to work.  There was no leavening agent and no flour.  How could this possibly work?  We speculated that the first batch of these cookies were probably made by someone who had begun making peanut butter cookies and had creamed together the peanut butter, sugar and vanilla, and was called away.  They probably asked another person in their household to finish the cookies, but this second person didn’t realize they were only looking at phase one, so they baked them.  When the result came out okay, the flourless peanut butter cookie was born.

Of course, the original author of this recipe could have been  a baker who truly understood how different ingredients interact during the baking and cooking process.  This knowledge allowed them to create something different.   Whoever it was, I would like to thank them.  These peanut butter cookies are really delicious.

It was on a lazy Sunday afternoon when I was visiting my mother that we finally decided to try the recipe.  To tell the truth, we were absolutely certain that it would not work.  We joked about baking cookies for the dogs.  To our surprise, we ended up with a plate full of delicious peanut butter cookies.

To create these delicious cookies you only need 4 ingredients–peanut butter, sugar, vanilla and an egg.  This can be done with any kind of peanut butter, but if you are using “all natural” peanut butter, make sure that it is well mixed.  You need an equal portion of ground nuts and their oil for this to work correctly.   Because there is no flour to add, these cookies are much easier to stir by hand.  This means they are easier for the little ones to mix together.

One word of caution is that these cookies must cool for 5 minutes or so, before you attempt to remove them from the cookie sheet.  If you don’t do this, they will fall apart.    If you want to make them a little more fancy, dip one half of each cookie into melted chocolate.  The chocolate coating takes these cookies from delicious to sinfully delicious.

Here’s the printable recipe.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

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