Aunt Verna's Peanut Butter Cookies

This week we had a massive winter storm in Ottawa, setting a new city record for the most snow in one day; by the end of the day we had accumulated 51.5 cm (or 20 inches) of snow! It reminded me of a snowstorm we had in Nova Scotia when I was a kid. I remember the snow being almost as tall as me! Of course I wasn't very tall yet, but the significant thing about it was the sense of awe and wonder.

My father John Holmes with my younger brother Thomas and I

Because they lived further away, my cousins in Ontario and California usually visited Cape Breton in the summer, where they would be staying at the bungalow (what they call a cottage in Cape Breton).

Back row: Uncle Walter, Nana, Aunt Ruth, Pop
Front row: Natalie, Jan and Tara Leonard

 

We too spent time at the bungalow every summer, but my family also went to Cape Breton over the Christmas holidays. When I was little we spent Christmas Day in Sydney, but we only continued to do that for a few years after Thomas was born. Then we spent Christmas at home and travelled to Sydney for the rest of the Christmas holidays. I remember flying as a child but at some point we started taking the train instead - which we really enjoyed - and we usually travelled on Boxing Day.

Thomas and I on a winter train ride to Sydney

After our big snowfall in Ottawa I tried to shoo my kids out the door to go tobogganing, and it reminded me of a time one winter when we were staying at Nana and Pop’s house on St Peter’s Rd.

I’m not sure if Nana was shooing me out the door to play in the snow, or if I wanted to go myself, or if my brother came with me or not. What I will never forget was Nana giving me a cardboard box and telling me to go sliding on the hill in the schoolyard of Colby School behind their house. I have a feeling cardboard boxes were sturdier in those days, and maybe they had a waxed finish, but still, a cardboard box?! Needless-to-say, it didn’t really work very well. But it was memorable!

 

Many years later I saw this Peanuts strip and remembered my own adventure trying to slide down a hill in a cardboard box.

In her “Leonard Family Tales” Mom talks about coming in from outside and having a winter treat, "Coming home from skating, a treat would be cocoa [hot chocolate] with bread and molasses with butter, but the butter was put on after the molasses." Since I haven’t tackled bread-making yet, I thought I’d try these cookies on our big “snow day.”

I don’t know if Nana made peanut butter cookies, but MY mother sure did! This handwritten recipe, in the back of Nana’s cookbook, was not in Nana's handwriting like the other recipes. I suspect this was written by a child, but I’m not sure if it was my mom or Aunt Edna. I asked Aunt Edna if she baked much with her mom and her response was, “I didn’t bake much with Mom at all that I remember – she always asked me to dust??” This leads me to suspect that Nana was trying to keep Edna busy and out of the kitchen. More than likely the recipe was written by Mom. I love the child's printing and the little flourish on the letter "g."

So here you go, the recipe.

Aunt Verna’s Peanut Butter Cookies

Preheat oven to 350°F

Ingredients:

½ cup butter

½ cup peanut butter
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 ¾ cup All Purpose flour
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda

Instructions:

Cream together butter and sugar. Add peanut butter and brown sugar and cream again. Add the egg and mix. Stir together dry ingredients and add. Use a teaspoon to scoop out dough and form balls the size of walnuts. Place the balls an inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Flatten the balls with a fork (dipped in water so it won't stick). Bake 8 -10 minutes and remove. The centre of the cookies may not look cooked but remove them anyway; they will puff up and then fall after they are removed. Makes 2 ½ - 3 dozen cookies.

Note: I cooked my first batch until the cookies puffed up and the edges looked cooked, but the edges were not browned. The second batch I cooked until the edges started to brown. I found the browned ones were too crispy and crumbly, while the others were nice and chewy. Mike suggested, having watched his mom make these, that they need to be smaller to make it easier to flatten with the fork. I have another recipe for peanut butter cookies that I used to make as a kid so I’ll have to try those at another time.

Baking Tip:

Measuring solid fats

Some things like shortening, butter or margarine, or in this case peanut butter, are hard to measure if they don’t come in ½ cup blocks or sticks. If you try to measure them in a measuring cup you have to make sure it is all pushed down and there are no air pockets. Then you have to use a spatula to scoop all that sticky peanut butter out of the measuring cup.

As an alternative, you can use a glass measuring cup. To measure out ½ cup of peanut butter for this recipe I filled a clear glass 2 cup measuring cup with 1 ½ cups water. Then, I scooped the peanut butter out of the jar and plopped it into the cup, and the water rose. Once the liquid hit 2 cups I knew that I had half a cup of peanut butter. It does not look appealing but it does make it easier.

Cookie dough is pretty thick and can be hard to mix
with a handheld mixer, but a stand mixer does the trick.