On a whim, I decided to make peanut butter cookies. My husband likes them, and he offered to clean the kitchen if I'd make them. Can't beat that deal! I like to put Hershey's kisses on top of the finished product:

Yum!

But, wait, what's this about an experiment? Don't worry, I'll get to it.

First, let's start with the basics

The peanut butter cookie recipe:
In a largeish bowl, mix together
- 1/2 cup softened butter (the soft part is important!)
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 1 large egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1/2 cup peanut butter

For cookies, I prefer to use creamy peanut butter. In fact, for most things, I prefer creamy peanut butter. I have two giant jars of crunchy in my pantry because Costco is evil and messes with my mind. So, crunchy it is! Mix everything together until the batter is smooth and creamy. I mix by hand, but, apparently, this is not normal, so feel free to use an electric mixer.

Once the batter is nice and creamy, add the dry ingredients:
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 cups flour (lightly spoon the flour into the measuring cup and level off)

Once these are thoroughly mixed together, you should have a bowl full of cookie dough. And it will be yummy. But don't eat it yet!

Form the dough into one-inch balls. At this point, you can put the balls of dough onto a cookie sheet and lightly mash them down using the traditional peanut butter cookie fork criss-cross. I, however, roll the balls in sugar and set them on the tray.

Bake the cookies at 375 degrees for 8-11 minutes. Yes, preheat the oven first. No, I didn't mention that at the beginning. The cookies should be golden. If you went the dough-ball-rolled-in-sugar method, you can pop a Hersey's kiss (unwrapped!) on top of the cookie as soon as you take them out of the oven. Press the kiss down until the cookie slightly cracks. This recipe makes 2-4 dozen cookies, depending on how large you think one inch is.

The experiment:
After I made the cookies, I got to thinking about my lovely goddaughter, who suffers a peanut allergy. Now, my goddaughter won't be getting the peanut butter cookies, because she's in New York and I'm not, but that's not the point here. The point is, my, uh... is there a word that means "goddaughter's mother"? Let's just call her Andrea. You may recall her from the post before this one. Anyway, Andrea got me buying sunflower butter. Would sunflower butter make good cookies? What about almond butter! Ooooh.

Using the recipe above, I made three small batches of cookies. The first batch was the peanut butter. Everyone loves peanut butter cookies, right? The other two batches used sunflower butter and almond butter in place of the peanut butter. It is important to note that if you're making sunflower butter cookies specifically for someone with a peanut allergy, do not use the same tools that you used to make the peanut butter cookies. In my kitchen, these cookies would all be labelled "Manufactured in a facility that uses peanuts". I had no real reason to be careful.

I didn't protograph the three different batters in the mixing stages. They all look the same. Scroll up, look at the picture at the top again. There you go. The almond butter batter, however, smells fantastic. The method of cooking is also the same. I attempted to make thumbprint cookies just to differentiate between the three types.

The verdict:
I took the cookies to work for a taste test. Everyone liked the peanut butter cookies. The almond butter cookies? Fantastic! The response was overwhelmingly positive and there were no leftovers. The sunflower butter cookies? Eh. The response was very mixed - one coworker loved them, one hated them, two thought they were just okay. I fall into the just okay category. Not the worst cookies ever, though, and a good alternative if peanuts just aren't your thing.

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