Almond Butter Cookies

I am happy to say my little recipe experiment worked.  Since Hunter is allergic to peanuts, I was wondering if I could use other nut butters in various recipes.  I finally found an almond butter that was not made on the same machines as peanuts, and it happens to be the Blue Diamond brand, which is the only nuts we could find not made with peanuts. **Note - the nuts and butters from Blue Diamond are made on the same equipment as other tree nuts. We tried dipping celery in almond butter, no luck.  We tried it spread on toast, no luck.  Hunter can be incredibly picky at times, and since he's never had a peanut butter sandwich, he doesn't get the whole texture thing, which is a smidge less creamy in the almond butter.

So, I moved on to cookies.  Macarons are made from almonds, we like spritz cookies with almond flavoring, why not try almond butter cookies? It should be easy, and it was.  I took my favorite peanut butter cookie recipe and substituted almond butter for the peanut butter.  The hubby and both mini men are quite happy.  I know for sure that the hubby isn't just being nice because he stole the bag of remaining cookies and took it with him.

Here's the recipe, adapted from The Good Housekeeping Cookbook.
1 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup creamy almond butter
1/2 cup softened unsalted butter (1 stick)
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup powdered sugar (optional, I did this even though it's not in the original recipe)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Mix together butter, sugars, egg, almond butter, and vanilla.  In a small bowl, blend flour, salt and baking soda.  Add flour mixture to butter mix. Mix until thouroghly combined. 
Scoop out by rounded teaspoon size and roll in a small bowl of powdered sugar before baking. Press down the tops to flatten slightly. Bake for 15 - 20 mins.  Cool on a wire rack and enjoy, with milk was the preference at our house.

Another option for finishing the cookies is to add white chocolate chips to the mixture.  These were Henry's favorite.