1 cup peanut butter

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract (they work fine w/o, but this adds an extra bit of tasty)

Couple cups of anything you want to add in (optional). We’ve used Hershey’s kisses, chocolate chips, and mini Reese’s peanut butter cups (dough around cup), and you could probably also use things like M&Ms, nuts, and such. 

1: Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2: Mix your base ingredients, plus add-ins if you prefer to add them that way.

3: Roll into 1-inch balls and set on cookie sheets. Wax paper is good but optional, these don’t really stick. 

4: Flatten them gently into cookie shape with a fork or cookie stamp- these don’t expand. Tip: if you use small add-ons and stick some on the bottom of each ball at this stage, you can have a pattern on top of the cookie without the pattern being full of add-ons. Especially good w/ cookie stamps. 

5: Bake for 10-12 minutes if plain or 13-15 minutes if add-ons are involved.

6: Let cool. These freeze and keep great that way if you wait for them to get about room-temp before freezing. 

And that’s it! Good w/ kids, it’s hard to mess up. You can multiply it very easily, as you can see. One batch makes about 15 cookies depending on rolling size, so I like to do a double batch. Just don’t put stuffed ones on the same sheet as plain ones, they cook differently. 

These are really good basic cookies to experiment with adding things into, and they’re great as plain cookies. You wouldn’t think it’d work this well, but it does.