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.
- 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
- Mix together the oil, sugars, and eggs.
- Add the vanilla extract and mix in well.
- 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.
- Chill for about an hour.
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or lightly grease them.
- Roll the dough into little balls about three-quarters of an inch in diameter.
- 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.
- Bake for twelve to fifteen minutes then cool on a rack before storing.