Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Sablé Cookies

Easy, healthy recipe for melt-in-the-mouth cookies made with crunchy peanut butter, dark chocolate chips and reduced in sugar. In the style of shortbread or French sablés.

Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies

It’s already the second week of the mid-term school winter holidays. The children have had a ball with sleep-overs, ‘hanging out’ chez les amis (‘playing’ is now banned from our silly adult vocabulary.) On return from their friends’ homes, they described what they had for dinner and, top of the list, what was for goûter at 4pm official French snack time. They raved about their friends’ homemade cookies.
“You know, Mum, they made the most incredible cookies; they made them all by themselves; these cookies were the most incredible biscuits we’ve ever had. They put chocolate chips in them, M&Ms, marshmallows…
Why don’t we ever make cookies like them?”

WHAT?! Ah bon. I could feel myself standing to my full height. After all the choux buns, éclairs, financiers, tigrés, crêpes, tarts and mille-feuilles (recipes for all of them in Teatime in Paris), moelleux au chocolat, chestnut flour Scotch pancakes, and stacks of macarons – my kids have never actually made homemade cookies? What kind of a mum is that? Wait a minute, we have melting moments together, don’t we? Yes, but they don’t include chocolate chips.

When I mentioned the reaction to the friends’ cookies, my Mum burst into hysterics. Apparently, I’m Granny’s double: Mum used to come home from a friend’s house, also raving about what she’d eaten there and my Granny would throw a wobbly with the kids. Nobody could be better than my proud, Scottish Granny. What? She served you tinned mandarines and you think that’s better than what you get here? I didn’t even realise that I demonstrated the same. Exactly the same. Thanks, Mum.

So, you want cookies like your friends? I’ll give you cookies.

Melt-in-the-mouth peanut buttery cookies – a bit like French sablés.

Easy Peanut Butter & Chocolate Chip Cookies for Kids

To make it up to them for a cookie-less Mum, I needed inspiration from my blogging friends for cookies that used peanut butter. You see, Julie has just discovered peanut butter – as peanut butter is not something the French normally keep in their store cupboards. I hear you: I’m a Scot – but I’m more French these days (for better or for worse).

I found many super peanut butter recipes. The problem is that so many US recipes deal in cups; I prefer grams like in France and the UK and so we wildly adapted a mix of several recipes and came up with this. Since then, I’ve tweaked the dosage yet again to make it more like shortbread or a French sablé.

The girls did a great job. The texture wasn’t too soft or crispy either, even if we could have upped the peanut butter, I prefer how it’s subtle and gives enough crunch and saltiness. No need to use an electric mixer: the children wanted a hands-on approach, which is much more fun – and an arm workout as holiday sport!

They’re melt-in-the-mouth, not too sweet, have an appealing saltiness to them, and they’re well, compulsive eating.

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookies