Sugar Cookie Morphs into Pecan Cookie

SAM_0872
What a handy thing to have a serviceable recipe for cookies quickly made. Friends of mine in Yarmouth, Carrie and Ben Yardley, developed variations on a basic, freezeable sugar cookie dough that gives them almond, vanilla, lemon poppy, orange and pecan cookies merely by the addition of extract, rinds, nuts and seeds. I test-drove the pecan cookies this past weekend, and produced about five dozen perfectly delicious little cookies of the grab-a-handful sort.

The basic recipe calls for three-quarters cup of oil, a cup of sugar, and two eggs beaten together, to which one adds extract or citrus peel for flavoring, then two and a half cups of flour, one and a half teaspoons of baking powder and salt. Vegetable oil for shortening makes these cookie economical.

It is good to refrigerate the dough before rolling it into little balls. (And you can freeze the little balls and pull out only what you need to bake them off.) To further vary the cookies, the little balls are rolled in sugar, or ground nuts, or have a nut pressed into the top. After baking, you can glaze the lemon or orange cookies with juice and confectioner’s sugar. Slick. Delicious. Easy.

The pecan cookie variation was different from the other variations in that it uses part brown sugar. For some reason, it really appealed to me, so the other day when it was cold and rainy, I felt like baking and threw these together in short order. The only hard part was rolling them in a mix of sugar and chopped pecans, if you consider that hard work.

Eating them later wasn’t hard at all.

Pecan Sugar Cookie
Serves: Makes about 6 dozen
 
Ingredients
  • ¾ cup vegetable oil
  • ½ cup white sugar
  • ½ cup brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 ½ cups flour
  • 1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
  • ¾ teaspoon salt
  • ¼ cup of sugar
  • ¼ cup chopped pecans
  • Whole pecans
Instructions
  1. Mix together the oil, sugars, and eggs.
  2. Add the vanilla extract and mix in well.
  3. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and add one cup at a time to the oil and sugar mixture stirring to make a smooth dough.
  4. Chill for about an hour.
  5. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or lightly grease them.
  6. Roll the dough into little balls about three-quarters of an inch in diameter.
  7. Roll them in a mixture of sugar and pecans, and press half a pecan into the top and flatten gently with the bottom of a glass.
  8. Bake for twelve to fifteen minutes then cool on a rack before storing.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.