Gluten free peanut butter cookies

Gluten free peanut butter cookies are an almond flour cookie packed with peanut butter that you can make in 30 minutes. These easy flourless peanut butter cookies will delight peanut butter lovers!

I love taking a traditional cookie recipe like chocolate chip, lemon cookies, or sugar cookies and turning it into a gluten free cookie recipe. Often a gluten free flour blend or almond flour is a key to transforming a flour based recipe.

Here I am using almond flour as the cookie base and adding in a nice balance of peanut butter to bake a simple, light and somewhat crumbly classic peanut butter cookie that melts in your mouth.

If you like these gluten-free peanut butter cookies, you’ll love the lemon version I made of lemon almond flour cookies! You’ll find almond flour in this recipe for gluten free sugar cookies and almond flour chocolate chip cookies, too.

Cookie ingredients

• butter- start with unsalted butter at room temperature. Usually peanut butter has some salt included so you don’t need the extra salt from salted butter
• sugar- white, granulated sugar works well in this recipe
• egg- only 1 large egg is needed
• peanut butter- I made these cookies with store-bought creamy peanut butter. If you try the recipe with natural peanut butter or crunchy peanut butter please let me know.
• almond flour- Almond flour is a wonderful gluten free baking ingredient. See below for more info on the difference between almond flour and almond meal
• baking soda

What’s missing: salt, xanthan gum, peanut butter chips or chocolate chips, brown sugar, vanilla extract.

Xanthan gum is a popular ingredient in gluten free cookies and it tends to be part of gluten-free flour blends. The nature of these almond flour cookies is more crumbly cookie and less chewy cookies so xanthan gum isn’t used. Feel free to add vanilla if you wish– 1 tsp would be all you need. Add ins like peanut butter chips would add to the peanut butter flavor. Chocolate chips are a great pairing with peanut butter so add a cup if you’d like.

Steps

1. Beat the sugar and butter in a stand mixer or in a large bowl with a hand held mixer. Add the egg then the peanut butter.
2. Add the dry ingredients of almond flour and baking soda and mix until blended.
3. Scoop out and form small balls of cookie dough and place them on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. If you like the crisscross pattern common on traditional peanut butter cookies, refrigerate the balls of cookie dough for about 15 minutes then use a fork to press down on each ball with the back of a fork in a crosshatch pattern.
4. Bake at 350 degrees F for 16-18 minutes then cool on the baking pan for 10 minutes before moving the cookies to a wire rack until completely cooled. Store in an airtight container.

Optional– sprinkle a small amount of sugar on top of the cookies before baking for an added sweet crunch.

One of the tricks with these peanut butter cookies is to remove them from the oven BEFORE you think they are fully cooked — this means that at the end of the 16-18 minutes of baking time, the cookies will still look and feel very soft. If you press the tops or sides of the cookies fresh out of the oven, the cookies will change shape easily. Don’t worry, the cookies will cool and firm up in their shape on the cooling rack. If you leave the cookies in the oven until the tops are golden brown, the bottom of the cookies will be overdone and burnt.

Good Cookie Food Bloggers’ Valentine Event 2022

For the last few years I’ve participated in a special fundraising event led by Julie Deily of The Little Kitchen in which a group of food bloggers share recipes and make donations to an amazing organization, Cookies for Kids’ Cancer.

Cancer is the #1 cause of death of children by disease in the U.S. There are 40,000 U.S. children actively battling cancer right now. The National Cancer Institute’s budget for childhood cancer is less than 4%. It’s such a small number and that’s one reason why our help is needed.

Children are diagnosed with cancer each and every day. It’s imperative that we raise awareness and continue to raise funds to fund the ongoing pediatric cancer research!

Cookies for Kids’ Cancer raises money for pediatric cancer research in hopes of developing new and better treatments for the many children facing and fighting cancer. I am proud to support their efforts.

Won’t you join us in this Be A Good Cookie Fundraiser? Click here to donate.

We send our thanks for the corporate sponsors of OXO, Dixie Crystals, and Mediavine who are matching the group’s donations up to $3000. Amazing!