Petra Cox: I am Petra Cox, a baker with Mom's Apple Pie Company in Occoquan, Virginia and today I am showing you how to make a delicious peanut butter cookies. So the first thing we will be doing is we are going to be using our stand mixer. So I will show you how we get started there.

So the first thing that we are going to be doing is adding our sugar and butter, combining those together, half cup of granulated and half cup packed dark brown sugar, needs to combine that in the mixer. So that needs to be combines until it's nice and light and you shouldn't see too much of the actual grains of sugar. So I am going to beat it for a little more and never hurt to scrape down the sides of your bowl, just to make sure that everything is being added together. So at this point, it's gotten a little glossy or it's lightened up in color and so at this point we can add our eggs, one at a time. You add them one at a time so that you don't add too much liquid at once. You never want to add too much liquid or too much of a dry ingredient in one part when you are making cookies or cakes or baking in general.

So once that's incorporated you can add your other egg. Alright, the two eggs have been added in. So I will scrape the sides down again, at this point we will add vanilla. You can use anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon, I like it kind of heavy on the vanilla. The peanut butter flavor is strong enough that the vanilla doesn't overpower it, so you can add as much as you like and now to this combination, I will add the peanut butter. I am using smooth peanut butter. Smooth peanut butter I will say is a little easier to mix. If you are using chunky peanut butter, don't use this whisk one, this whisk attachment, use the beater attachment on your mixer.

So the peanut butter I am going to add in four additions, just so that I am not adding it all it once, so that it gets mixed in gradually and just make sure that you are incorporating it nicely into the cookie dough as you add it. This is a pretty powerful stand mixer and that's why you can use the whisk attachment when adding the peanut butter. We can use our last bit of peanut butter and if you go by weight this peanut butter cookie is really mostly peanut butter which is nice. It's a really rich, nutty cookie.

Now that we have all of the sort of more wet ingredients in there, we are going to add our flour which is three cups and that's been sifted together with some baking soda just a teaspoon of baking soda. I will add that about a third of a cup at a time so that it goes in somewhat more gradually. I have the mix run pretty low so that the flour doesn't sort of just puff up into my face as I am adding this and if you put it on higher for just a second it gets the stuff that's gone to the center of the mixer out towards the edges.

At this point, I am going to take the bowl out of the mixer and sort of combine the dough last second by hand before putting it on the tray. And that's how we make peanut butter cookie dough.