Old-Fashioned Peanut Butter Cookies

Sometimes the only cookie that will do, for me, is a peanut butter cookie:
It helps that I can convince myself that it is healthy.

There are a ton of recipes out there, but I used this one that appeared in Bon Appétit in 1998. It follows the basic cookie formula. First, you cream together your peanut butter and butter:

You cream in sugars and add eggs and vanilla, and then add in the flour and leavening:

Using wet hands to keep them a bit cleaner, roll the dough into balls. Then, one of my favorite parts - smushing the dough down with a fork to create the classic criss-cross pattern:

I baked these on parchment-lined sheets:

The best way to tell if a cookie is finished baking is to peek at the bottom of one with your spatula. Here are two finished cookies, one upside-down. You can see that the top of the cookie is just beginning to get golden brown, and the bottom is even and golden: