Better Nutters

These peanut-butter filled oatmeal sandwich cookies looked simple, but this weekend project ended up being spread over three days.

The recipe comes from Bouchon Bakery, and is the latest stop in my random walk through the book. It’s based on the Nutter Butter which Wikipedia tells me has been on the market for over 40 years. I’ve never had one before, and don’t plan to either.

There are three components to make: the buttercream, the filling, and the cookie dough. Since the buttercream makes more than twice what’s needed in the filling, and it’s hard to make a small batch of buttercream, I doubled up on the cookies. The dough is extremely soft and sticky when it’s close to room temperature.

After chilling the completed dough, I needed to re-chill it after rolling it flat, since it had gotten so sticky. I didn’t have a 3” cookie cutter, so I made one batch using a 3¾” cutter, but these were really, really big. The next batch, I made using 2” cutters (that’s what you see in the photos).

I’ve made Italian meringue buttercream before, so I had no trouble with that. After making the peanut butter filling, I realized that this batch of cookies utilized more than 500g of peanut butter. Bring on the calories.

My schedule ended up something like:

• Saturday afternoon: make cookie dough, shape into flat square, chill
• Sunday: roll dough, chill, make buttercream, cut cookies out, chill
• Monday: bake off cookies, make filling, chill, pipe filling

I give these cookies a thumbs up on taste, but a thumbs down for effort. The cookie dough is very hard to work with, and requires constant chilling, while the filling requires making a buttercream.