These crispy but tender peanut butter oatmeal cookies with a sweet, creamy peanut butter filling taste just like Do-Si-Dos Girl Scout Cookies—but they’re gluten free. Some matters you just have to take into your own hands!
Girl Scout Cookies Are Delicious
When I was in my 20s and working in an office, if I ever heard that someone had a little girl at home who was selling Girl Scout Cookies but I didn’t get a chance to place an order, I wasn’t just mad. I remember being devastated.
Given the chance, I’d buy at least 2 if not 3 or 4 boxes of Thin Mints and at least one box of Do-Si-Dos peanut butter sandwiches. The Thin Mints went directly into the freezer. And you could only have one if you asked. Nicely. Fast forward a bunch of years and a gluten free son. ?
If you’d like to support a sweet little Girl Scout in your neighborhood, of course, you should buy their original cookies. The “regular” non-gluten free Girl Scout cookies have truly superior taste and texture. (I remember trying Nabisco Grasshopper cookies hoping they’d be just like Thin Mints. No such luck.)
But if you’re gluten free and you want to support the Girl Scouts of America, I’d suggest buying their regular cookies and gifting them to someone who can eat them. Their gluten free varieties are fine—but they’re simply not anywhere near as good as the original.
Plus, they only make basic gluten free cookies like chocolate chippers. No GF Thin Mints or Do-Si-Dos.
How to make these peanut butter oatmeal cookies
Do-Si-Dos (also called Peanut Butter Sandwiches, depending upon your Girl Scout Cookie bakery) are crispy peanut butter oatmeal cookies with a peanut butter filling. They’re not really crunchy, just crispy.
Baking with peanut butter tends to make cookies very crunchy, like these classic peanut butter crosshatch cookies. But these peanut butter oatmeal cookies have oats and more butter than crunchy cookies (plus a bit more peanut butter), so they’re tender and crispy.
For the cookies, you’ll start by melting the peanut butter and butter in either a saucepan or the microwave. Then set it aside to cool briefly. Then just mix together the dry ingredients (gf flour, xanthan gum, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugars, oats), with the wet ingredients (melted peanut butter and butter mixture, vanilla and egg).
When a recipe says to “mix,” you should mix by hand. If a handheld or stand mixer is appropriate, the recipe should state that clearly. Most baking recipes should not be overmixed, even in gluten free recipes.
I like these cookies to be crisp-tender, because it’s much more enjoyable to bite into a cookie with that texture when it has a creamy filling. For even crispier cookies that tend to break when you bite into them, more like our chocolate wafer cookies, press the raw disks flatter than shown in the photo.
When I make these cookies, which are like a cross between crosshatch peanut butter cookies and our thick and chewy gluten free oatmeal cookies, I generally like to fill about half of them with filling and keep the rest of the cookies separate and unfilled.
Do-Si-Dos are all filled with this simple peanut butter filling, made here with basically just butter, peanut butter, vanilla and some confectioners’ sugar. But you can make the cookies ahead of time and store them in the freezer and fill them soon before serving. You can also just serve them alone.
Ingredients and substitutions
Dairy-free: The cookies and the filling in this recipe have dairy in them in the form of butter. I recommend trying to replace the butter in the cookies with half (by weight) Earth Balance buttery sticks and half nonhydrogenated vegetable shortening (I like Spectrum brand best). That should provide the proper moisture balance and the proper taste.
For the butter in the filling, you can try replacing it with all Spectrum nonhydgrogenated vegetable shortening. The cream can easily be replaced with coconut cream or just a smaller volume of unsweetened almond milk (or your favorite nondairy milk).
Egg-free: The cookies in this recipe only call for one egg in the entire recipe. For that reason, I’m pretty confident that you can replace it with one “chia egg” (1 tablespoon ground white chia seeds + 1 tablespoon lukewarm water, mixed and allowed to gel).
Oats: If you can’t have oats for any reason, try replacing the oats in this recipe with beaten rice. There’s more information on the blog about the products that I recommend using to replace oats in baking.
Peanut-free: No-stir smooth almond butter is a perfect replacement for the peanut butter, in equal amounts, in this recipe. I recommend using Barney Butter brand, which doesn’t require stirring to integrate the oil into the peanut butter.
Then fold over the bare one-third, like a business envelope (do you say aaaaanvelope or ehnvelope?).
Then the other third. Seal in the butter.
Oh em gee, we’re folding again. Another business letter. Who are we writing anyway?
We have rolled, dotted with butter, then folded, rolled again – now folded once more. Now — we chill. Again. Until firm in the freezer. It’s the best way, because it’s speedy. And I am not renowned for my patience.
