Soft, chewy, and brown-sugary, built around a brown-sugar-style erythritol/stevia blend (such as Truvia Sweet Complete Brown) instead of sugar.
- ⏲️ Prep time: 45 min
- 🍳 Cook time: 11 min
- 🍽️ Servings: 24
Ingredients
- 1 cup creamy peanut butter, no sugar added, well stirred
- 6 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
- 0.8 cup brown-sugar-style erythritol/stevia blend, lightly packed
- 1 large egg, room temperature
- 1 large egg yolk, room temperature
- 3 tbsp heavy cream or whole milk
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1.3 cups all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled
- 0.8 tsp baking soda
- 0.8 tsp fine sea salt
- 0.5 tsp flaky sea salt, for finishing
Directions
- Powder the sweetener: run it in a blender or food processor until it looks like powdered sugar. This is the step that keeps the cookies from tasting gritty, so don’t skip it. Let the dust settle before opening the lid.
- Cream the butter and powdered sweetener with a hand mixer until pale and fluffy. Take the full time here.
- Beat in the peanut butter, then the egg, egg yolk, cream, and vanilla. Mix until completely smooth and glossy, scraping the bowl once.
- Add the flour, baking soda, and fine sea salt. Mix on low just until the last dry streaks disappear, then stop. Overmixing makes them tough.
- Cover and refrigerate the dough 30 minutes. It will be soft and sticky at first; chilling makes it scoopable and keeps the cookies thick.
- Heat the oven to 350°F and line two sheets with parchment. Roll the dough into balls of about 1 1/2 tbsp each, space them 2 inches apart, and press a light crosshatch with a fork. Keep them chunky and don’t flatten them out.
- Bake 10-11 minutes. Pull them when the edges are set but the centers still look puffy and underbaked. The sweetener firms up a lot as it cools, so a cookie that looks done in the oven will be dry on the plate.
- Sprinkle immediately with the flaky sea salt, then leave the cookies on the hot sheet for a full 15 minutes without moving them. They’re fragile hot and finish setting as they cool.
Spoon the flour into the measuring cup and level it with a knife; dipping the cup into the bag packs in an extra 20-25%, which is the fastest way to end up with dry cookies. If you taste any bitterness from the sweetener, add another 1/4 tsp of fine salt next batch, since salt suppresses bitterness better than more sweetener does. Keeps airtight at room temperature 4-5 days, and gets chewier overnight. Raw dough balls can be frozen and baked from frozen with 2 extra minutes.
Contributor(s)
- mcginnisa