Pecan Crispies, Page 117, 2nd Column, 2nd Recipe

My random recipe from my 1976 cook book for this weekend was an easy one, Pecan Crispies.  Basically a simple drop cookie with pecans.

The star of the show!

It’s in my 1953 cook book as well, but very different. No sugar, just brown sugar and 1/2 and 1/2 butter and shortening. It’s in none of the other editions I have, and I haven’t really found an equivalent online anywhere either unfortunately.  It’s pretty much a chocolate chip cookie recipe, but with the nuts instead, but there were differences in the ingredients and proportions even to the Chocolate Chippers recipe (this one is very similar to the Chocolate Chippers recipe, but not quite the same) in my 1976 book.

So first read over, and it’s pretty a pretty standard drop cookie recipe, but one thing stands out.  Oddly it calls for 6 tablespoons of sugar and brown sugar each.  What a pain in the rear to measure!  And it only uses a little over a cup of flour, so this would make only 2 sheets of cookies (3 dozen) at most.  

I immediately decided I’d do ¼ cup and 2 tablespoons instead, although sugar would be easy enough to measure, I couldn’t imagine packing brown sugar into the tablespoon 6 times.  But as I thought about the recipe over the week I settled on doubling it.  This way I could do ¾ cup of each of the sugars instead and have more cookies to bring into work.

The steps were completely standard for a drop cookie as well, cream butter and sugars until light then add other wet ingredients, except....hmmm.  This mixture of butter and the sugars was pretty darn dense!  I had to think over my measurements for the ingredients, did I go wrong with my doubling?

Butter, sugar, and brown sugar
looking a bit dense.

When I double a recipe, I get really paranoid that I’ll accidentally miss doubling something.  So I looked it over again and yes, I had everything right.  Wow was it dense, as you can see.  So I added the remaining wet ingredients, then after mixing the dry ingredients (excluding the nuts) I mixed that in next.  

The finished dough for the Pecan Crispies.

Again another surprise.  Where the Chocolate Chipper recipe dough is fairly easy to work with, not sticky, this stuff was very sticky.  Was it strictly the shortening vs. butter difference, or was the proportion of ingredients important to this as well?  I folded the nuts into the dough and proceeded to spoon out the cookies.  

Pecan Crispies ready to bake!

The whole process was slower because of the stickiness and I kept fretting that I had somehow forgotten to double something, but the dough tasted good, so I kept at it.  I cooked the first batch 10 minutes and that looked pretty good, I did do the last sheet for 11 minutes for an even firmer cookie, both tasted very nice.

Pecan Crispies cooling on the rack!

Because there is a preference at work for crispy cookies rather than chewy ones, I let these sit on the sheet for about 30 seconds before trying to remove them.  Then I let them cool on the rack completely, and finally even after I’d boxed them up I let the box stay open overnight to let them dry further.

The result was a hit.  Everyone at work liked them, and I really liked them too.  Although I got the comment that someone liked the cookies because they weren’t “too sweet”, perhaps it was the absence of chocolate chips or other sweet ingredient that did that because the proportion of sugar to flour seemed pretty standard, if not a little higher than usual.  

Lessons Learned:

I need a 3rd cooling rack.  Getting 3 cookie sheets has been really nice, I need to balance this out with a 3rd rack so that the cookies have enough time to cool completely.

Should I toast the nuts before using them?  In another cookie baking book I have they recommend toasting any nuts used in cookies for a better flavor.  I should do a cookie throw down and test the difference at work!

Next time I double a recipe, I think I’m going to get a post it and put it over the numbers in the list of ingredients and write in the doubled number.  This way I do it all in one go, and I can just read and not have to think about it as I go along.