Air-Fryer Peanut Butter Cookies

The three-ingredient peanut butter cookie is a recipe that shouldn't work and does anyway. One cup of peanut butter. One cup of sugar. One egg. That's it. No flour, no butter, no baking soda. The peanut butter contributes the fat AND the protein structure; the sugar dissolves into the egg as you mix; the egg holds it together. The texture is dense and chewy, the flavour is unrepentantly peanut-buttery, and the cookies are gluten-free by default — which matters if you have a flour-allergic friend.

The fork-marks on top are mandatory. They're not decorative — they flatten the dough (which won't spread on its own without flour), and they're the visual signature of the recipe. The criss-cross pattern is the cultural marker that says "this is a peanut butter cookie" even from across the room.

The photo shows them on a mustard-yellow plate (a colour scheme that's specifically right for these), seven cookies plus crumbs, with a glass of milk that's been hit with a moment of foam from pouring fresh. One cookie is broken at the corner showing the dense, slightly molten interior. The crackled tops are golden-brown on the high points where the fork pressed down; lighter in the valleys.

A note on peanut butter: use natural peanut butter (just peanuts + salt — the oil that separates and you stir back in). The processed kind (Skippy, Jif) has added sugar and stabilisers that change the texture. The cookies will still work; they'll just be sweeter and slightly oilier.