Nutter Butters

For the last month at work all I have been hearing is ‘Nutta Butta, Nutta Butta, Nutta Butta.’ I had never heard of a Nutter Butter before. It turns out there are two forms a Nutter Butter can take. The first is a packaged American cookie snack.

The second Nutter Butter is a cookie sandwich made with peanut butter oat cookies and peanut. My friend Andie had the Nutter Butter cookie sandwich at Bouchon Bakery in Napa, California. Hearing her describe this cookie made me drool, which is why we decided that I should try to recreate it. Luckily Andie found the recipe in a 2006 New York Times article.

So I started by baking a billion cookies:

The recipe made a lot more cookies than I was expecting, though I think I made my cookies a bit too small. Then I went about trying to match all the cookies with their perfect partner. Putting the tiny cookies together and the thick big cookies together and so on. My cookies often don’t turn out perfectly uniform in size and shape. Next step: adding a layer of super sweet peanut butter frosting in-between the cookies.

I found that with the recipe I had a lot of cookies left over after I used the frosting up. These were turned in to a fabulous midnight snack, ice cream sandwiches!

I found the cookies on their own were not that exciting. They are not very sweet and there is not a strong enough peanut taste to call them a peanut butter cookie. I did like the crunch the crushed up peanuts provided. The frosting middle to this cookie sandwich is a well balanced pairing. The frosting is overwhelmingly sweet on its own, but it works well to brighten up the cookies and to add a creamy sweet punch.

I ended up with a lot of cookies sandwiches, even after they were thoroughly taste tested at work. So I started to experiment with some of the left overs on how to elevate this classic cookie to a new level. The result was a rich chocolate ganache topped Nutter Butter. Now that’s what i’m talking about!