Turkey Peanut Butter Cup Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why do they put fork marks in peanut butter cookies? ›

These early recipes do not explain why the advice is given to use a fork, though. The reason is that peanut butter cookie dough is dense, and unpressed, each cookie will not cook evenly. Using a fork to press the dough is a convenience of tool; bakers can also use a cookie shovel (spatula).

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.

Overmixing the dough

If you overmix the dough, the cookies will be dry and crumbly. The best way to fix this is to add more liquid to the dough. This can be done by adding milk, water, or even melted butter. You may also need to add more flour to the dough if it is too wet.

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.

The most common mistake with peanut butter cookies is using the wrong type of peanut butter. The BEST peanut butter for today's cookies is a processed creamy peanut butter, preferably Jif or Skippy.

You baked your cookies and they came out an oily greasy mess. Urgh, what an awful feeling! If you've had this happen to you, odds are you made one of two mistakes: either you didn't allow the ingredients to thoroughly mix during the creaming process or you didn't allow the dough to rest enough before baking.

Yes, shortening yields chewier cookies than butter does, because butter contains water and shortening doesn't. But you can easily make up for butter's crisping tendencies by using crucial ingredient No. 3… Brown sugar instead of white sugar.

If you don't flatten the cookies first, then the fork does double duty – it performs both functions. One very subtle result of creating the pattern is that the little tips of dough bake up crisper than the rest of the cookie, giving you both a bit of additional texture and deeper taste where the dough is more baked.

Dry – “Dry” or “Crumbly” dough is a product of over-mixing or using too much of any ingredient during the mixing process. This can be reversed by adding one to two tablespoons of liquid (water, milk or softened butter) to your mix.

It's been the “mark” of this classic treat for more than eighty years, and for good reason: by flattening this dense cookie dough, it ensures that each cookie bakes evenly.

Can you overmix cookie dough? ›

Unless you want extra-crispy cookies, avoid overmixing your dough. "Overmixing your dough will result in flatter, crispier cookies," Cowan said. If you overmix, you will end up aerating (adding air to) the dough, which causes the cookies to rise and then fall, leaving you with flat cookies.

You do not have to chill this peanut butter cookie dough for perfectly thick cookies that are full of peanut buttery flavor. You can chill the dough for up to 72 hours if you prefer. Chilling cookie dough is very similar to marinating meat – things just get so much better if you wait a day or two.

For starters, chilling prevents cookies from spreading out too quickly once they're in the oven. If you use a higher fat butter (like Kerrygold), chilling your dough is absolutely essential. Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool.

You can use a fork or a dough docker to prick small holes all over the surface of the dough. By venting the steam, docking keeps the dough from billowing or heaving as it bakes. It's an important step for crisp cookies or that are baked all in a single sheet and not cut up until they come out of the oven.

Why Do You Put Fork Lines in Peanut Butter Cookies? Our Test Kitchen experts say the fork lines are there to help peanut butter cookies cook more evenly.

My trusted method for getting ripply, jagged-topped cookies has been simple–scoop the cookie dough with two forks, or as I like to call it, forking your dough. Take two forks and rough up the dough a little bit. Use the tines of both forks to gather up as much dough as you want in a bundle.

If you don't flatten the cookies first, then the fork does double duty – it performs both functions. One very subtle result of creating the pattern is that the little tips of dough bake up crisper than the rest of the cookie, giving you both a bit of additional texture and deeper taste where the dough is more baked.