Lemon Pecan Dainties, Page 120, 2nd Column, 2nd Recipe Down

This week’s recipe that I pulled from my little container of slips was “Lemon Pecan Dainties.”  Again, something I might not have picked out. 

First step was to dig through my 6 versions of the recipe book and see what kind of history this recipe had.  As it turns out, it was only in my 1976 book, and the 1953 book.  The older recipe has shortening instead of butter, but otherwise it was basically the same.  Sadly, I could find no similar recipe on allrecipes.com.

The recipe reminded me of the “Sandies” I’d made earlier, but this time there was the added lemon zest, and lemon juice.  Also the dough was to be formed in a roll, chilled and sliced rather than chilled and shaped by hand.

Now in these older Better Homes and Gardens recipe books, most recipes have the ingredients listed up top then instructions, but some have all the ingredients woven into just a paragraph, so no listing of ingredients.  So you have to read the whole recipe to figure out what all you need, which is annoying.

But this time it was pretty simple.  I just needed the lemon and chopped pecans, everything else was standard stuff off the shelf.

Lemon zest from my microplane!

The cookie started the standard way, cream butter and sugar, then start adding other wet ingredients.  I had fun with my microplane again and got my teaspoon of lemon zest and then a tablespoon of juice and added those to the butter and sugar.  Then combining all the dry ingredients (except the nuts) and mixing that in.  This was another stiff dough and the mixer definitely earned its keep.

The microplane.

Next was to add the 1 cup of finely chopped nuts.  Now these were clearly pretty coarsely chopped, so I knew I needed to chop them up and used my food processor to do it.  But I am uncertain how far down you have to go for it to be considered “finely” chopped.  I suppose there must be some formal cooking definition, but I just got them to about half the size they were from the package and went with that.

Creamed butter and sugar with
lemon juice and zest ready to mix in.

I added the nuts and started up the mixer again and got them thoroughly mixed in.  When I went to scoop the dough from the mixer, I found it to be very clingy.  It stuck to the beater and the sides of the bowl, and my rubber spatula as well.

Dry ingredients added.

Nuts mixed in.

I turned out the dough onto some plastic wrap and started forming a cylinder.  As I squeezed down the size, since it was supposed to be two inches in diameter, the plastic got wrinkly so I ended up  unwrapping the dough and rewrapping it to smooth the surface out as I got it into shape.

Next I put it in the refrigerator to chill thoroughly.

Now once it was cooled, the next step was to slice “very thinly.”  I really wish they’d just give a thickness instead.  So being the mathy geek I am, I measured the length of the roll, and then divided that by the number of cookies it was supposed to make.  Based on that the thickness should be between 1/8 to 3/16 of an inch thick.

Section of chilled dough ready to slice.

Sliced dough, need to work on even slices.

But the dough, although thoroughly chilled, was still a bit on the pliable side.  After cutting enough cookies for one sheet, I put the rest of the roll in the freezer.  Once the dough was completely frozen, slicing went much better.

For the slicing I did have to use a very sharp smooth edged knife (not serrated!) and a sawing motion to cut through the cookie.  Otherwise I think the nuts would have been dragged through the dough.  Even so I had a difficult time maintaining a 1/8” slice.  Somehow ¼” is easy to slice, but 1/8” is more troublesome.  I would keep veering off partway through.

So the cookies were ready for baking, and I used the full 12 minutes after checking them at 10 and still finding them too soft.  I then made the mistake of listening to the recipe when it said to leave the cookies on the sheet for a few moments after coming out of the over.  After a few moments, they didn’t want to come off the sheet.

The finished Lemon Pecan Dainties!

After that I removed them promptly and that worked fine.  The result was a crispy cookie with a gentle lemon flavor and a nice dose of pecans in each.  I took them into work and folks really liked them.  Definitely a very nice cookie, very tasty.

I then pulled next week’s recipe from my container. “Date Filled Cookies”  Definitely something I would never pick on my own.  But I’ve now got 2 packages of dates waiting on the shelf for this one.

Lessons learned:

Label stuff.  I had some extremely finely chopped nuts on the shelf in a Ziploc baggie, but I had no idea what type they were or when I had done them.  I need to label stuff I put on the shelf in baggies in the future.

Freezing worked better for slicing these cookies.

I either need practice, or a better way to get 1/8” slices from a cylinder of cookie dough.

Only taking part of the dough at a time for slicing worked well, that way the dough stayed consistently firm as I grabbed a new piece to work with.