Scout’s Honor PB Sandwich Cookies: A Better Version of a Nutter Butter

Homemade peanut butter sandwich cookies are way better than the store-bought stand-ins!

More cookies! It’s still December, and we are still baking. 

I spotted Kathryn Wilson’s gorgeous peanut butter sandwich cookies on Instagram and fell in love. She graciously shared the recipe with me, and I fell deeper in love. 

“It’s an older recipe I’ve loved from one of my most used cookie cookbooks,” Kathryn says, referring to King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion: The Essential Cookie Cookbook. “I haven’t seen it online and even called King Arthur about it. I ran out of peanut butter while making it, so resorted to a melted chocolate ganache for half my cookies. Both versions were good!”

Kathryn is an expert cookie baker (read about her in The Great Cookie Tin Bake-Off, in the December issue of The Buzz. So we followed her lead and filled half the cookies with peanut butter and half with chocolate. While ours weren’t as beautiful as Kathryn’s, they were delicious. The peanut butter-filled cookies were a much more complex, homemade version of Nutter Butters. And the ganache-filled cookies, well, there is nothing wrong with peanut butter and chocolate. The dough, which is the same for both cookies, has oats in it, which gives great texture and sends these way over top from the store-bought goodies. 

This is a fun-to-make cookie perfect for the holidays. We wrapped ours up and brought them to teachers!

Scout’s Honor PB Sandwich Cookies

Ingredients: 
1/3 cup unsalted butter
2/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 large egg
¾ cup all-purpose flour
1 cup rolled oats

Filling
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 tablespoon honey
¼ cup confectioners’ sugar

Ganache
4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
½ cup heavy cream

Recipe directions: 
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease (or line with parchment) two baking sheets.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, peanut butter, sugars, baking soda, baking powder, salt and vanilla. Add the egg, beating until light and fluffy. Stir in the flour and oats. Drop the dough by the heaping teaspoonful (a teaspoon cookie scoop works well here) onto the prepared baking sheets. Use the bottom of a drinking glass, lightly greased, to press each cookie to about ¼-inch thick.

Bake the cookies for 8 minutes, or until they are a very light golden brown. Remove them from the oven and transfer to a rack to cool.

To make the filling: In a small bowl, cream together the peanut butter, honey and confectioners’ sugar until smooth.

To assemble the cookies: When the cookies are cool, spread half of them with the filling, or if you have a teaspoon cookie scoop, use it to drop the filling into mounds atop half the cookies. Top the filling with the remaining cookies, pressing together gently. 

Note: If you choose, as Kathryn did, to fill some of the cookies with chocolate ganache, halve the peanut butter filling recipe, and fill half of the cookie sandwiches with peanut butter, and half with ganache.

Place the chocolate in a medium bowl. Heat the cream in a small saucepan over medium heat until it just begins to simmer. Pour the warm cream over the chocolate. Let stand, undisturbed, for 5 minutes, then stir until smooth. To allow the ganache to firm up, chill it for 1 hour prior to filling cookies.