Salty-Sweet Peanut Butter Sandies from @MysteryMacRae

 

We had a cold, rainy, dark day recently. The only thing for it was to bake something. Here’s a recipe for a slightly different peanut butter cookie. They're tender, tasty, and have that wonderful melt in your mouth shortbread-ish texture. They're also easy and guaranteed to turn around a dreich* afternoon.

Salty-Sweet Peanut Butter Sandies

Adapted from the New York Times

 

Notice the terrific crime scene trivet - perfect for hot cookie sheets coming out of the oven.

Ingredients

1 cup unsalted butter, softened at room temperature

¾ cup white sugar

¾ cup brown sugar

1 scant teaspoon salt

2 cups unsweetened peanut butter, creamy or chunky

2 eggs

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon Flaky sea salt and 2 tablespoons coarse sugar mixed together for sprinkling

 

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or nonstick liners.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugars until smooth and fluffy. Add peanut butter and eggs. Mix well. Add flour and salt and mix until combined and no flour shows.

Using a spoon or cookie scoop, drop mounds of dough (about 2 teaspoons per cookie) onto prepared pans. Rough tops are good; They’ll catch and hold the sprinkled salt and sugar. The cookies won’t spread much or change shape as they bake, so they can be close together, though not touching. You want a bit of room between them so they brown all the way around.

Sprinkle each cookie with the flaky salt – coarse sugar mixture.

Bake 12-15 minutes, until cookies are set and golden-brown. Carefully lift off baking sheets and cool on racks. To store, layer the cookies in an airtight container, separating the layers with wax paper or parchment paper.

* Dreich is good Scottish word that describes the kind of day we were having when I baked these - rainy, gray, cold, blah. 

 

In bookstores and libraries now!

About Argyles and Arsenic – book 5 in the Highland Bookshop Mysteries:

After 93 well-lived years, Violet MacAskill is ready to simplify her life. Her eccentric solution? She’ll throw a decanting and decluttering party at her family home—a Scottish Baronial manor near the seaside town of Inversgail, Scotland. Violet sets aside everything she wants or needs, then she invites her many friends in to sip sherry and help themselves to whatever they want from all that’s left.

But a murder during Violet’s party leads to a poisonous game of cat and mouse – with the women of Yon Bonnie Books playing to win.

Available in hardback and e-book from your locally owned independent bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Or ask your public library to consider ordering it.

 

The Boston Globe says Molly MacRae writes “murder with a dose of drollery.” She’s the author of the award-winning, national bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries and the Highland Bookshop Mysteries. As Margaret Welch, she writes books for Annie’s Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and she’s a winner of the Sherwood Anderson Award for Short Fiction. Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest and connect with her on Twitter  or Instagram.