Graham Crackers from King Arthur Baking Company's Book "Sweet and Salty", made April 17, 2026

I have a friend who LOVED her school snack of graham crackers with PB&J inside. She says that they were a frozen treat. My school never offered these plus I am a lot older than her so I have no concept. The texture she describes is a soft graham cracker (but more the texture of an ice cream sandwich bar than a store bought graham cracker) with the filling included.

I thought what better way to make her this than to pull out a kids' recipe book and create homemade graham crackers to fill.

well...I do not think that I messed up this recipe because I read it many times over, thinking that it had to be incorrect. However, since it was from King Arthur, a generally reliable source AND the recipe was found in a cookbook designed for kids, I didn't hesitate making it.

There were a few things that I didn't feel right about:

1. The dough was very thin, 1/16" inch. It seemed way too thin for any graham crackers that I ever ate. I thought that maybe they rise a lot? They certainly didn't.

2. I had to bake them for 10 minutes and then take the hot pan out, set it on my counter top and measure rectangles to score/cut.

3. I then was required to return them to the oven and shuffle the two trays around, remembering their order ahead of time to shuffle properly.

4. I needed to bake until "the crackers are browning around the edges". Well...this is where it went worse. Had the instructions just said a baking time, no matter what, I would have followed that but, I kept them in a lot longer since there wasn't browning around the edges at the time that they suggested that this would occur.

5. The final directions was to turn off the heat in the oven, cool down the oven and then trap them in to complete their cooling.

By the time that I took them out and gave them to my friend, they were like kids teething bisquits! Oh dear! Not a great gift at all.

So, the one thing that I didn't mention is that I did refrigerate the dough after I rolled it out for 15 minutes because the dough was so warm after the rolling that, if they were regular cookies like sugar cookies, they would have spread drastically during the baking and not held any shape. Maybe that is what I did wrong and that threw off the baking times?

IF I ever make these again, I would not roll them out this thin nor keep them in the oven to cool down thoroughly. I would treat them more like a sugar cookie and pull them when they are softer.

Here is what they looked like: I guess that I didn't take a photo of the finished crackers which seems weird to me but here are the "teaser" photos to my friend:

These were rolled out prior to baking. They are very thin-- more like a fruit roll up than a graham cracker, especially for a kid.