You may have noticed that I don’t feature dessert recipes very often. The reason is I simply don’t make them very often because I’m not much of a dessert person. I’d usually prefer a second helping of the main course instead of dessert. In fact, I make desserts so infrequently that when I do bake something like cookies, Mark is very surprised and confused. Because I don’t make that many desserts, I’m not particularly good at it. Although I rarely follow recipes when I’m doing regular cooking, I almost always follow recipes exactly, or close to it, when I’m baking (bread, too, although I am good at that and do it often), which is another reason I don’t have many dessert recipes here. Nonetheless, I came across a dessert recipe recently that I wanted to try and since it’s one I found on the internet, I can share it with you. I can take absolutely no credit for this one; it’s all The Sugar Pixie‘s. The only changes I made to her recipe were to veganize it.

And with that buildup, I introduce:

Peanut Butter Sriracha Cookies

Okay, now you know why I had to make them! You know we go through a bottle of sriracha a week, right? And peanut butter is one of the world’s most perfect foods. Why shouldn’t they go together in cookie form? The original recipe is here: http://www.thesugarpixie.net/2010/11/28/peanut-butter-sriracha-cookies/; all I did was make substitutions for the butter and eggs. I also halved the recipe since Mark and I don’t need to eat five dozen cookies between us.

1/2 cup soy margarine, softened (ordinarily I’d have used Earth Balance’s Buttery Sticks, but I was out and there was snow, so I just used the kind in the plastic tub)
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
2 Tbsp sriracha
egg replacer for 1 egg (I used 1 scant Tbsp flax seeds, ground, blended with 3 Tbsp water)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups + 2 Tbsp all-purpose flour (a little more if necessary)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking soda
extra white sugar

First I made my “egg”; I put a scant tablespoon of flax seeds in my spice grinder, …

… ground them to a powder, then added 3 tablespoons water and blended until smooth.

Put the white and brown sugars, peanut butter, and margarine into a mixing bowl …

… and cream.

Add the vanilla, sriracha, and egg replacer …

and mix until well blended.

In a separate large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Add the peanut butter mixture …

… and mix. After a few stirs, it’s easiest to just use your hands. I used a little too much flour; your dough should be slightly less dry than mine. I’ve adjusted the amount called for above (the original recipe was correct; I just added 1 1/2 cups right away and shouldn’t have).

Refrigerate for an hour. Mine was actually refrigerated for two or more hours while I was out shoveling snow and because it was a little overly dry, I let it sit out and warm back up to room temperature before dealing with it. I probably could have just baked them without refrigerating the dough and it may have been easier.

Roll the dough into 1-inch balls. If you weren’t as aggressive with the flour as I was, you could use a small, 1-inch scoop but my dough was too stiff for that.

Dip each ball into a small bowl of sugar.

Place each ball on a cookie sheet. You’ll notice here my balls are flattened. Because my dough was so crumbly, I made disks instead of balls so they didn’t fall apart when I smooshed them later.

Flatten each cookie with the back of a fork in a criss-cross fashion. Again, because my dough was crumbly, I just did this lightly to get the traditional peanut butter cookie pattern.

Bake for 10 minutes in a pre-heated 375-degree (Fahrenheit) oven and remove to wire racks for cooling.

Mine didn’t turn out as pretty as Sugar Pixie’s because of the extra flour, but they tasted just great. I don’t know that I would have guessed they had sriracha in them. You don’t really taste it at first, then your tongue feels a bit warm, then you just feel like you would if you had just eaten a peanut butter cookie, which is happy! Actually, I baked one sheet of the cookies for a minute longer than the other, so they are crunchier, and that batch is noticeably hotter than the other, which is interesting considering it was the same dough. I’ll be making these again, and be more careful about the flour.

Also,