Peanut Butter Cookies

As a fundamentally lazy creature (teighlach notwithstanding) the Gargoyle is always drawn to recipes that promise minimum fuss and minimum ingredients. 3 or 4 ingredient anything is likely to appeal.

Especially since there was Vitamin B2 to play with, and having succeeded in making alcohol glow in UV light, the next step was to find out what else it might work in.

Enter 4 ingredient peanut butter cookies. The ingredients are:

• Peanut butter, 1 cup

• Sugar, usually 1 cup

• Egg, 1

• Some recipes say vanilla for flavor. Some recipes say baking powder for softer texture. And 3 ingredient peanut butter cookies are a thing too.

Some recipes are very, very insistent on using the "like your mom bought in the 80s" non-gourmet peanut butter, emphasizing importance of all that extra stuff in them. Other recipes suggest that nothing short of all-natural organic peanut butter should desecrate the sanctity of your precious family's kitchen. The Gargoyle tends to prefer the single-ingredient PB for snacking purposes, but in this case went with Wegmans Creamy PB which includes sugar, molasses and vegetable oil (because it was the cheapest one with relatively natural ingredients.)

Sugar recommendations vary, of course. Brown produces a softer cookie, and that's what we went with.

An egg is an egg, what. (If you're cooking with 10 eggs and the recipe says 10 large eggs, maybe you actually need to adjust the number if you bought non-large ones for some reason. On the scale of a single egg the size difference is fairly trivial. Check out The Kitchn doing a whole lot of geeking out about it here).

We did add baking powder.

Since recipes suggest in fairly equal numbers the one true way of combining any two of the major ingredients above and then adding the third (or combining all three at once), we picked the steps at semi-random. With a stand mixer.

Crushed vitamin B2 glows. White chocolate chips...maybe?

We also split the dough in half and added white chocolate chips to half of it. And 100mg of crushed vitamin B2 (diluted with a tsp of water into slurry, not filtered) to the other half.

Vitamin B2 looks fabulously radioactive and will turn a bottle of gin into a bottle of unsightly yellow sludge that looks really cool under the blacklights. But will it in a cookie?

Line a baking sheet with parchment and lubricate it, because that's never a bad plan.

Pre-heat the oven to 350.

The dough can be expected to make a dozen cookies. Portion them out accordingly onto the parchment with a spoon or a scoop or whatever. (Because the chips clearly did not belong, we opted for the "hand-roll a spoon-ful into a dough ball that actually stays together" method.)

All the recipes then said to press a fork into a dough ball in two directions to make a cross-hatch pattern. This is because peanut butter is dense and needs to be squished down to cook thoroughly. Our dough texture was sticky and the fork did not always come off cleanly. (Which suggests that one of the peanut butter choice camps was probably right.)

Baking for 10 minutes was obviously not enough, but 15 turned out to be borderline too much - they didn't quite burn, but they were pretty close.

Take out, pop on cooling rack, collect after at least 10 minutes.

Do they glow? It ain't so.

Verdict: dense, sweet and a bit oily. The chocolate chip ones provide a welcome texture break, making the notion of other additives tempting. (Walnut fragments might provide a good textural contrast.)

The glow-in-the-dark (left cookie) does not affect taste.... and also is obviously insufficient to make much difference under blacklights (although if one squints real hard one can maybe sometimes see the bright yellow specks unfiltered residue). Nor do baked white chocolate chips (right cookie).

So, obviously, if it's to work at all, there needs to be lots more of it, and maybe less other stuff? Stay tuned for another attempt to add B2 to food.