Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Here Comes the Sun - Sunflower Butter Cookies

Everyone is familiar with Peanut Butter cookies.  Those sweet and salty biscuits with the clever hatch marks on the top.  Did you know that other nut butters work just as well as Peanut butter?  Yep, it's true.  And since I know several people with peanut allergies, who are also allergic to tree nuts of all kinds, I have started turning to my favorite substitute on a regular basis.   Sunflower Seed Butter.  

True, they don't taste exactly like peanut butter cookies, but they are pretty close.   In fact, I think sunflower seed butter tastes more like peanut butter than the almond butter does.

Sunflower Butter Cookies

1/2 cup (4 oz) (113g) Unsalted Butter
1/2 cup (4.5 oz) (130g) Sunflower Butter
1/2 cup (3.5 oz) (100g) Granulated Sugar
1/2 cup (3.6 oz) (102g) Dark Brown Sugar
1 large Egg
1/2 tsp Vanilla
1 1/2 cups (6.6 oz) (187g) AP Flour
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp Kosher Salt

You know the drill...

Place Butter and Sunflower butter in the bowl of you mixer and beat until well combined.

Add the both the Sugars and cream them together.

Add the Egg and mix until emulsified, then add the Vanilla and mix a little longer.


In a small bowl, whisk Flour, Baking Powder, Baking Soda and Salt together.

Add the flour mixture to the mixing bowl and beat on low speed until well combined and a soft sticky dough forms.

Remove the dough from the bowl, wrap in plastic film and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 F (175 C) degrees
Roll Walnut sized balls of dough and place on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Using a fork, create hatch marks on the cookies, flattening them slightly. 

(This is a requirement, don't ask me why, it's just tradition - though I have been told that if this is not done, it will cause a distortion in the space-time continuum)  ;)

Bake for 10-12 minutes.

Let the cookies cool on the pan for 5 minutes before moving to a cooling rack.

Then grab a big glass of ice cold milk and enjoy.

Mangia!!
~~

3 comments:

Patti T. said...

I will have to look around for the sunflower butter, sounds good.

Michele said...

Hey Shane! I have a question about the sunflower butter. I used it in place of peanut butter in my fudge puddles and a day or two later the cookies were green molded and the leftover batter than I left in the fridge was green molded too. Do you think that it had something to do with the sunflower butter? It was a fresh jar that I bought to make the cookies. I'd love to hear what the alchemist thinks!

Shane T. Wingerd said...

Michele - Oh, I am sorry... My first guess would be that somehow the sunflower seeds themselves were infected during manufacturing. It could also be that the jar was not properly sealed during packaging. If it was in one of those plastic jars, there may have been a fault in the plastic container. That happened to me with Almond Butter before. I had bought it a week before and when I finally opened it, it was already molded. Ever since then, I keep all nut butters in the refrigerator, even if they haven't been opened yet. If you have any of that sunflower butter left, I would probably take it back to the store and let them know, the whole lot may be infected somehow.