Almond Flour Peanut Butter Cookies

Baking. Most people associate this word with a lot of butter, flour, cream, etc… but that just has never been my style. 

Limiting wheat yet baking all of the time seems ironic… but, a lot of recipes do not even require flour at all.  Or can easily be made without using flour. Omitting flours containing gluten or using sprouted grains will make the food easier for your body to digest.

Here is one of my favorite flourless peanut butter cookie recipes that calls for almond flour.

  

Almond flour/meal can be found in the organic baking section of most grocery stores. It is just raw, blanched almonds ground up until they are a flour consistency.  You can make your own by grinding up raw almonds in a food processor until they are like a flour (but before they start to form a paste).

If you eat this cookie and did not know it has is almond flour instead of wheat flour, you would never notice the difference. 

It is soft and crispy at the same time, with the perfect balance of peanut butter and sweetness. 

  

I recently made them for my family and they mentioned that this cookie is just too easy to eat. 

Oops. ;)

Almond Flour Peanut Butter Cookies

• 3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened (to use less butter, cut it in half and add ¼ cup applesauce. Or replace the butter totally with ½ cup applesauce or 2 mashed bananas)
• 1 cup of peanut butter, creamy or crunchy (I like using ½ cup natural crunchy and ½ cup creamy)
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 2 ½ cups ground almond meal/almond flour
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

- Directions

- In a small bowl whisk together the almond flour, salt, and baking soda.

- In a mixer, blend the butter and sugar on high speed until creamy.  Scrap down the sides as you mix. When creamy, add the eggs one at a time. Add in the vanilla.  Again, Scrap down the sides or the bowl.

- Gradually add in the flour mixture until combined.

- Refrigerate for around 15-30 minutes.  You can also bake them right away without chilling the dough. I am inpatient, of course, and I start baking right away and just keep the dough in the fridge as I wait for the first batch to bake.

- Using a cookie scoop, scoop the balls on a baking sheet and sprinkle with sugar.  If the dough has been chilled in the fridge, if may be harder in order to make fork marks on the top of the cookies to create a cross-hatch pattern.  But, these are soft cookies so the cross-hatch mark may not stay as the cookies bake. But the flavor is still amazing, so don’t worry!!

- Bake at 375 degree for about 10 minutes, rotating the sheets halfway through the baking.

- Let cool and move to wire rack. Store in an airtight container.

This is a great peanut butter cookie. It may even be one of my favorite pb recipes. 

Definitely worthy of selling one day… I’ll keep you posted. :)