Classic Chocolate Peanut Butter No Bake Cookie Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why won't my no bake cookies get hard? ›

You want the butter, milk, sugar, and cocoa mixture to boil for 2-3 full minutes and reach between 190°F-200°F. If you don't boil them for long enough, they will turn out gooey and will not set.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

A: Chances are if the no-bakes turned out dry and crumbly it was because you overcooked them.

Healthy No Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies (1 cookie) contains 6.8g total carbs, 5.8g net carbs, 5.7g fat, 2.2g protein, and 85 calories.

Baking at 375 degrees F as opposed to a lower temperature will help cookies stay soft: they'll bake faster which means they aren't in the hot, drying air of the oven too long. Pull the cookie sheet out of the oven when the cookies are just set: underbaking is better than overbaking.

Cookies become hard when the moisture in them evaporates. This can be caused by leaving them out in the air for too long, baking them for too long, or storing them improperly. The lack of moisture makes the cookies hard and dry, which makes them difficult to enjoy.

Why did my peanut butter cookies turn out hard? This is most likely to happen from over-baking your cookies. Make sure to take them out of the oven when they're still a bit soft in the middles, that way they can finish cooking on their cookie sheets outside the oven.

So it looks like that there are utilitarian reasons for the cross-hatching—to allow for even cooking—but it might have been passed along for nearly a hundred years for primarily aesthetic reasons, where the cross-hatching is more to identify the cookies as peanut butter ones, rather than to cook them well.

Conventional creamy peanut butter works best for peanut butter cookie recipes because it has a smooth and even texture. My favorite creamy peanut butter brands are Skippy or Jif. Natural peanut butter, made up of just peanuts and salt, is typically very oily and hard to get even.

If your cookies come out of the oven looking flat, you may not have adequately chilled the dough before baking. Chilling times may vary depending on the cookie you're making, but you should typically chill cookie dough in the refrigerator for at least two hours before you pop it in the oven.

How to keep no-bake cookies from being grainy? ›

Just follow your regular recipe as usual , but only put enough milk in to be able to stir your mixture. Bring to a slow boil, stirring constantly to ensure your sugar melts evenly so it won't be grainy. Bring to a full rolling boil for one minute and you should have perfect no-bake every time.

Homemade Peanut Butter Cookies (1 oz) contains 16.7g total carbs, 16.7g net carbs, 6.7g fat, 2.6g protein, and 135 calories.

Reese's Reese's Pieces Cookies (1 cookie) contains 27g total carbs, 26g net carbs, 8g fat, 2g protein, and 199 calories.

Decrease the number of eggs in your recipe, or use egg yolks in place of whole eggs. Too high a ratio of brown sugar to white sugar. Increase the ratio of white sugar to brown sugar, or use all white sugar. Using corn syrup will also help crisp up a cookie when it bakes.

No matter how careful I am about not over boiling the sugar mixture I always seem to do it, causing a very dry no-bake cookie. My solution is to scrape all the cookies back in the pan and add enough milk to be able to stir it over low heat.

The Problem: Your Oven Is Too Hot

If your cookies repeatedly turn out flat, no matter the recipe, chances are your oven is too hot. Here's what's happening. The butter melts super quickly in a too-hot oven before the other ingredients have firmed up into a cookie structure.

If your cookie dough is dry and crumbly, there are a few things you can do to fix it. First, try adding more liquid to the dough. This can be milk, water, or even just a little bit of extra oil. If that doesn't work, you can try kneading the dough for a few minutes to help it come together.