3-Ingredient Peanut Butter Thumbprint Cookies Recipe

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Peanut butter cookies are a classic treat that hits all the right notes — they're moist, soft, and sugary with peanut buttery richness and a down-home, nostalgic feel. Dress them up with chocolate chips or raisins, or keep them plain, because they don't necessarily anything else to be delicious. As far as dressing them down, there's a way to make peanut butter cookies easier than ever by paring them down to the bare essentials.

Recipe developer Michelle Bottalico has created a recipe for three-ingredient peanut butter thumbprint cookies that will simplify your baking experience without skimping on PB goodness. All you'll need is peanut butter, brown sugar, and an egg. If you're pressed for time, you can mix the ingredients together, roll the dough into balls, flatten them with a fork to give them a traditional crisscross pattern, and bake. Bottalico's recipe takes these simple cookies to the next level by turning them into thumbprint cookies, all while retaining that three-ingredient standard.

The ingredients for these cookies couldn't be easier to find — in fact, they may already be sitting in your pantry and fridge. All you'll need is creamy peanut butter, brown sugar, and a large egg. Read the recipe carefully, because you'll measure out different quantities of peanut butter and sugar for the cookie dough and the filling balls.

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Mix ¾ cup peanut butter, ½ cup brown sugar, and egg in a mixing bowl until well combined.

Roll the mixture into 18 balls (using about 1 tablespoon of dough for each ball) and place them on a greased cookie sheet.

Press the tip of your thumb into the center of each ball to make a depression. Set aside.

To make the filling, mix ¼ cup peanut butter and ¼ cup brown sugar in a mixing bowl until smooth.

Roll the filling into 18 small balls using 1 teaspoon of dough each.

Place the remaining ¼ cup of brown sugar in a small shallow bowl.

Roll each of the filling balls in the sugar until evenly coated.

Place the filling balls into the depressions in the cookies, pressing lightly to shape them to the depressions and allow them to adhere to the cookies.

Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes, until slightly browned.

Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely. Don't touch them before that or they will fall apart.

Serve or store the cookies in an airtight container for up to 3 days.

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Classic peanut butter cookies are a sweet and nostalgic treat many of us are familiar with, and they were the model from which this three-ingredient recipe was adapted. The biggest difference is that regular peanut butter cookies have many more ingredients. Typical peanut butter cookie recipes start like many baking recipes do, by making a dry mixture and a wet mixture and combining them. The dry ingredients are usually flour, baking soda, and salt. The wet ingredients start with a fat like butter or shortening. One or more sources of sugar is added, commonly brown sugar, but sometimes granulated sugar or even honey. Finally, the wet ingredients include egg, vanilla extract, and peanut butter (check out the best type of peanut butter to use for cookies).

Of course, these 3-ingredient peanut butter cookies only have three ingredients: peanut butter, brown sugar, and egg. Bottalico chose the three most important ingredients to maintain a sweet, peanut buttery flavor and to have the cookies hold together. Because there's no flour, the cookies are gluten-free. If you make them without the thumbprint style, simply flattening the dough balls and marking them with fork before baking in the traditional style, then they are faster to make than the regular cookies. What both versions have in common is a rich peanut butter flavor, lots of sweetness, and a moist, soft, and chewy texture.

There are many ways to make these peanut butter thumbprint cookies your own. First, you could use chunky peanut butter instead of the creamy kind, or alternate chunky and creamy between the cookie dough and the filling. You could add nuts like walnuts to the dough or mix in chocolate chips or raisins for added interest. If you add another egg, the cookies will be fluffier.

Switching up the sugar is another choice. This recipe calls for brown sugar, but granulated sugar would also work. Brown sugar is moister and slightly less sweet because it contains molasses, but you won't notice a big difference. Maple syrup and honey could also be substituted for all or part of the sugar, although the cookies won't be as crispy. If you're following a sugar-free diet, replace the sugar with one of the popular keto-friendly sweeteners on the market.

Instead of filling the thumbprint cookies with more peanut butter (which was necessary for this recipe to keep the ingredients to three), you could fill them with jelly for a peanut butter and jelly cookie, or with a Hershey's kiss for a chocolate version. Finally, sprinkle the cookies with flaky sea salt for a more complex sweet and salty flavor that's hard to resist.

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