Peanut butter, miso, and cinnamon cookies

Made in my tiny toaster oven!

EDITED AS OF 08/14: These cookies are actually incredibly nasty. I'm not sure what I was thinking, or perhaps I was just incredibly hungry after making them, but they are for all intents and purposes totally inedible now, and the very act of biting into one triggers an instant spit-it-out-now reflex. For the love of Pete, don't put the miso in these cookies. Just... keep them peanutbuttery. I will experiment further sometime down the line, I'm sure.


It's a rainy day in Nagoya, and after walking home from the gym at noon in a torrential downpour, complete with thunder, I abandoned previous plans to bum around downtown shopping, and decided to make it a lazy afternoon at home. And what's more rainy-day than making some cookies? These are modified from a recipe I found at Pattycake.


Ingredients:

Have all your ingredients at room temperature. Mix together by hand:

1 1/4c  peanut butter (I used the off-brand creamy peanut butter; it's sweetened with icing sugar, so be careful about this)
2 tbsp red miso paste (This is actually too much; I'd recommend only 1 tbsp)
1/4 c packed brown sugar
1 egg (lightly beaten)
2 tbsp tapioca starch (Next time I might add an extra tbsp of rice flour to bulk up the dough and make it less greasy)
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking soda


Turn on the toaster oven to heat up while you're mixing the ingredients. Mix them all together in a bowl, then add some chopped up ginger. The original recipe calls for candied ginger chunks; not having such fancy-dancy things immediately on hand, I just added some diced ginger from my freezer.

Roll out small balls of dough and press flat onto your toaster oven tray: mine's about a grillion years old and covered with the encrusted ick of a thousand from-frozen dinners, so I covered it with a sheet of tinfoil and smeared a bit of oil across it so that the cookies wouldn't stick... something which I believe was unnecessary now, since the cookies turn out fairly greasy anyways.

I can only fit on six at a time!

Pop these babies into the toaster oven for a good seven minutes. Any longer and the darn things will burn, which is what happened to my first batch. This recipe only makes about ten cookies, by the way; for me, it was a great way to use up some miso that had been sticking around in my fridge for a while and also experiment with the heat of my toaster oven for baking purposes. I'd say the whole process takes about 20 minutes from start to finish, though - and the taste is really quite extraordinary. I added way too much miso to mine, so my cookies are rather salty.... but in a good way! Still, next time I make this, I'm cutting down on the miso if it's red (and therefore saltier).

Slightly crispy; totally delicious.