Peanut Butter Cookies

Peanut butter cookies have a problem.  Go ahead and bake up a batch of your usual recipe.  Growing up, mine was the recipe on the crisco shortening can.  Vegetable shortening makes baked goods very soft and light, but it has no flavor at all, and now we also know it has unhealthy trans-fats.  So, switch to a butter recipe.  Now the cookies are nice and soft out of the oven, but they cool to a crisp, tough texture.  Also, neither of the recipes actually has a lot of peanut flavor!  So, some recipes call for adding in chopped peanuts, and yes, this does give the cookies bursts of nutty flavor, but it also makes the cookie have a crunchy texture.  My ideal peanut butter cookie is soft and tender, with nice crisp edges, and a lot of peanut flavor.  To make this happen, I use ground peanut flour in my cookies for part of the regular flour.  When you mix flour with water, you get gluten, a tough, chewy protein.  This is desirable in crusty French breads, which is why we knead and knead them, to develop lots of gluten, but in baked goods you want as little gluten as possible.  The nut flour does two things for the cookies: no gluten formation with water, resulting in a tender texture, and a huge boost of nutty flavor without the crunchy texture found in chopped nuts.  And so, a perfect peanut butter cookie, made with real butter, peanut butter, and home-ground peanut flour!  Also, they are huge - only six to a baking sheet!