Soy Butter Blossoms

Here's a blog entry I meant to make a month ago. Peanut butter blossoms are something people often make at Christmas.

I actually make them year-round. But I don't make peanut butter ones; I make soy butter ones.



You can hardly tell the difference.

My daughter is allergic to peanuts. I used to just be careful with peanut butter in our house, but at one point it became clear to us that just getting it on our dishes and counters was risking her life. She'll react to traces you can't even see and has ended up in the emergency room over it.

So for a while my husband gave up his peanut butter cookies. But then I learned about sunflower butter and soy butter.



A lot of people like Sunbutter, but it does taste like sunflower seeds, and it turns green in baked goods unless you add an acidic ingredient like lemon juice. My husband wasn't thrilled with those cookies. But when I baked them with soy nut butter, he ate a whole cookie without realizing it was different than a peanut butter cookie. They taste very similar.



The Brach's stars aren't safe for someone with a peanut allergy to eat; they have a shared facility warning on the package. But my daughter thinks that soy butter is creepy because it tastes like peanut butter, so she doesn't want to eat the cookies anyway.

My husband's grandma always made peanut blossoms with stars instead of Hershey's Kisses (which would be generally safe for a peanut-allergic person to eat). And they're easier to bite in a cookie. So I do use the stars.