Peanut Butter Cookies

 Today seemed like a good day to bake. It's only up to 20° at noon and snow flurries are brushing by the kitchen window as I wash the lunch dishes. Peanut butter cookies are on the agenda.

 Which recipe to use, though? I searched through Mom's cookbooks for the cookie she made when Bob  and I were kids. I always loved that basic recipe. I found it in her Mennonite Community Cookbook. It's undated but I know it's been around since I was a child. In fact, it's received such heavy use that the cover has fallen off.

[Note: A 65th anniversary edition was printed in 2015, thus the cookbook's first edition was dated 1950]

 Mom make copious notes (in ink) beside this recipe, most notably "Very good!". She also suggested to "cut recipe in half" and to "add two sm(all) eggs". She penned "just right" beside those notes. This basic peanut butter cookie  recipe has a date below it: 6/22/85. I assume that's the date of her notes (same color ink) because she had been making this recipe for many decades.

 Here is the recipe with full credit being given to the cookbook printed by The John  C. Winston Company and "Authorized by The Mennonite Community Association, Scottdale, Pa." The author was Mary Emma Showalter.


Peanut Butter Cookies

1 cup shortening
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla

My directions (not those printed): Cream shortening (I used two sticks of margarine) and peanut butter (8 ounces = 1/2 jar). As the melted margarine helps warm and incorporate the peanut butter, I mixed them together until creamy. I them added everything else except for the flour and made sure everything was thoroughly mixed. It should be satiny smooth:

 With the addition of the flour, the mixture will become quite thick:

 It must be refrigerated at this point for several hours to make it less sticky to work with. I then used a small ice cream scoop and gathered small balls of dough, placed them on a non-stick cookie sheet and crisscrossed the top with a fork. This pattern is traditional for peanut butter cookies.

 Here they are ready to go into the oven (above) and how they look when they come out (below).
 I baked them for 13 minutes (the recipe calls for 12 - 15 minutes in an oven set to 375°.

 The recipe also calls for shaping the dough into balls an inch in diameter. I used the small ice cream scoop and this produced 43 cookies versus the seven dozen called for,. Why make small cookies?

 Time now for a new pot of coffee ...