In the new millennium, convenience is king. As much of a joy as baking can be (and believe us, we LOVE baking!), there's not always time to start from scratch. So you turn to store-bought cookies instead of homemade. Maybe you trust a familiar, age-old brand and don't bother to question it, or maybe you don't have the time to investigate every ingredient to see if it's as scary as it sounds.
But we'll bet you have time to just count the number of ingredients, and we highly suggest that you do. Mrs. Field's Peanut Butter cookies, for example, have nineteen ingredients, many of which are made up of dizzying lists of their own ingredients.
And the amazingly simple truth is: you don't need all that stuff. After all, we're talking cookies here, not three-tiered wedding cakes or complicated french pastries. Now, we don't mean to imply that simple means boring or common. You can have simplicity right alongside elegance. Case in point: Real Simple magazine's December 2011 recipe for Toffee-Pretzel Peanut Butter Cookies (http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/toffee-pretzel-peanut-butter-cookies-00100000070694/index.html). Obviously, the pretzel's are a flour-filled addition, but if you strip this simple recipe down to it's basic ingredients, you have peanut butter, sugars, eggs, and baking soda. No flour needed, and no endless list of ingredients.
Our own Bizzy Lizzy Peanut Butter cookies offer the same delectable, devour-able elegance, with only nine ingredients: whole grain rolled oat-flax seed blend, natural peanut butter, sugar, butter, raisins, eggs, vanilla, baking soda and cinnamon. More importantly, these are all whole, natural ingredients--words and foods that you recognize, not some chemical mumbo-jumbo that's as bad for your belly as it is difficult to pronounce. Trust your gut, and treat it right, with simple, wholesome baking.