Skip to content
whisksweetly
Home Recipes About Contact

By course

By method

Air Fryer Peanut Butter Cookies

Three ingredients, eight minutes, six cookies at a time. No flour and no oven to heat.

Prep
10 min
Cook
8 min
Makes
Makes 18 cookies
Jump to the recipe
Peanut butter cookies on a tray with a spoonful of peanut butter
Photo: Anton Uniqueton / Pexels

The three-ingredient peanut butter cookie is a real thing and it works because peanut butter is already most of a cookie dough. It supplies the fat that shortens the crumb, the protein that sets it, and enough body to hold shape without flour. Sugar and egg do the rest.

Use the stabilised supermarket kind, not natural peanut butter. Natural butter separates and the oil pools in the dough, giving greasy cookies that spread into one sheet. This is the one occasion when the processed version is genuinely correct.

For something to assemble rather than bake twice, fruit pizza cookies use a flat sugar cookie as a base.

Fork marks are structural, not decorative. The dough does not spread much on its own, so pressing it flattens the ball to a thickness that cooks through in eight minutes. Cross-hatched in both directions, the cookie has an even depth.

For a cookie with more structure and a longer rest, see oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

Air fryers cook top-down and fast, so these go pale-golden rather than deep brown. Pull them while the centres still look soft — they are extremely fragile hot and firm up completely on cooling. Trying to lift one at four minutes is how you end up with crumbs.

Piped peanut butter cookies cooling on a rack
Photo: Cats Coming / Pexels

Peanut butter cookies, printed

Three ingredients, eight minutes, six cookies at a time. No flour and no oven to heat.

Three things, plus salt

  • 1 cup (270 g) smooth peanut butter, not natural
  • 1 cup (200 g) superfine sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract, optional
  • ½ tsp fine salt
  • Flaky salt, to finish

Rolling, forking, air frying

  1. 1 Beat the peanut butter, sugar, egg, vanilla and salt together until it forms a stiff, uniform dough. It comes together in about a minute.
  2. 2 Roll into 30 g balls. Chill 10 minutes if the dough feels soft.
  3. 3 Line the air fryer basket with a piece of perforated baking paper. Space six balls on it — they need room and they are too fragile to lift off bare metal.
  4. 4 Flatten each one with a fork, then again at right angles, to about 1 cm thick.
  5. 5 Cook at 325°F (160°C) for 7–8 minutes, until set at the edges and still soft in the middle.
  6. 6 Leave them in the basket 5 minutes before moving. Hot, they will break; cool, they hold together perfectly.

Temperature, and add-ins

  • A lower temperature than most air fryer recipes on purpose: at 190°C the outside is dark before the center sets.
  • Chocolate chips fold in well; add 100 g.

Which peanut butter to use

Not without adjustment. Its oil separates and the cookies spread into a single greasy sheet. Stabilised peanut butter is the right choice here.