“Homemade Nutter Butter Cookies” from Stella Parks’ Bravetart with an Autumnal Twist
How hard can it be: Pretty straightforward, but still takes a while
Overall Flavor Rating: 5/5
Recipe: From Bravetart, page 217
What went well:
The filling is unbelievably good.
The cookies came out actually looking like pumpkins. I thought for sure they would just melt into little puddles in the oven.
It didn’t take us multiple days!
What went poorly:
As per usual, we didn’t realize the butter needed to be softened.
I got absolutely covered in flour. Somehow I still haven’t realized I should always wear an apron.
The cookies still stuck to the counter despite me dumping a ton of flour on the counter.
We decided to make Nutter Butters because …. Ok we didn’t really have a great reason for making them other than that we wanted to. Plus the recipe said it would only take an hour and a half all in (spoiler: it took longer).
Really though, the making of the dough was pretty straightforward. You just combine a bunch of stuff in a stand mixer and let it do its thing for a bit.
To start, you’re going to want to completely miss the instruction that says that the butter should be softened to almost room temp. So then you can just go ahead and microwave the butter for 10 to 15 seconds to make up for your lack of reading comprehension skills.
After that you just combine the butter, sugar, peanut butter, baking soda, and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer and let it go for a bit.
At some point along the way you’ll want to scrape it down and add in some frothed egg whites.
Eventually it will look like this, then you just need to add the flour.
You simply add the flour and now it looks like cookie dough, amazing!
Next you divide the dough into two balls and roll it out. Here, we poured flour all over the counter and yet somehow, it still wasn’t enough. I’m absolutely baffled as to how the dough could have stuck to the countertop with that much flour down. Perhaps we’re just cursed. Anyway, here you can use whatever cookie cutter your heart desires. We went with a $1 pumpkin cutter from Target to make this activity seasonally appropriate and not just two people deciding they want to make cookies.
Once they were all cut out, we used a paring knife to add lines on the cookies so they looked more like pumpkins and less like apples. You can see this in the picture below when we put them into the oven (I forgot to take a picture on the countertop - whoops). Since we cut out shapes larger than anything that’s advised in the recipe, we just kind of winged it on the bake time. This worked out mostly fine.
While the cookies are in the oven, you can have a blast cleaning up your kitchen because you made a huge mess! Also at this point, you’ll realize that you forgot to put an apron on and you’re absolutely covered in flour and wearing all black. Perfect!
Once you’ve cleaned your stand mixer you can start making the cookie filling. This stuff is honestly magic. There’s so little that goes into it and it’s absolutely delicious. Like 11/10 delicious. To make it you just combine butter, peanut butter, salt, honey, and vanilla in the bowl of a stand mixer. Once they’ve “gotten to know each other” (shoutout to Binging with Babish), you sprinkle in powdered sugar until it forms a super light and fluffy peanut butter cream.
At some point while you’re making the filling, the cookies will probably be done. Ours seemed kind of pale when we pulled them, but they firmed up to an appropriate texture so I guess it was fine?
We baked the extra dough scraps. You can see that we shaped them into artistic lumps.
Once the cookies have cooled off a bit, you’ll realize this project has taken way too long and it’s now super late. Then you can forget to take photos of what the filling looks like when not in a ziploc bag and of putting the filling between the cookies. Fortunately, you’ll realize that you didn’t put nearly enough filling between the cookies so you’ll need to rip them apart and fill them again! This is ideal because now you can get a shot of what it looks like when you’re piping the filling out of your crappy ziploc bag pastry decorating setup.
Once all of the cookies were filled, they looked and tasted amazing. We brought them with us to a friend’s house and they were devoured so you can be assured I’m not just saying they were good. Seriously, everyone kept asking us where we bought the filling and it was incredibly satisfying to say that it was “artisanally hand crafted in small batches in our kitchen” (weirdly, after saying this we no longer have any friends).
I mean, look at ‘em. They look good right? You’re seeing that too right? It’s not just me?
All in all, unless you have a deadly peanut allergy, you should definitely make these things.