I've been trying to find a recipe for crispy peanut butter cookies. A
recipe I found online didn't stipulate that it would produce crispy
cookies, but years ago, a woman gave me a recipe that would make the
cookies crispy if you add some water (a small amount, like one-fourth
cup) to the final mixture. Anyway, this recipe I located called for
flour and baking soda. The woman I live with said I could eliminate the
baking soda because we were going to use self-rising flour. I'm not an
experienced baker, so I prefer to follow the recipe exactly, until at
some time in the future I'll know what ingredient causes what. I
followed her instructions and left out the baking soda. I also added a
bit of water to the recipe, hoping the cookies would turn out crispy.
The result: they SUCKED. So I found a new recipe, and it too called for
both baking soda and baking POWDER. There was no mention of self-rising
flour.

Here are my questions. What makes the cookies crispy? Can baking soda
and baking powder by eliminated and self-rising flour used instead, and
will it make my goal of crispier cookies impossible to achieve?

Thanks in advance.

[If you e-mail me, remove the brackets out of the e-mail address.]

Alric Knebel