Pecan cookies with chocolate caramel center.
I am now an expert at shucking pecans.
At Thanksgiving, Wes went over to his grandparents' house and he and his grandpa picked pecans. I wasn't there but I imagine they picked pecans for appropriately seven hours and eighteen minutes while discussing the complete works of Krisnamurti. Wes returned with a large paper grocery sack FILLED with raw pecans (still shelled). I like pecans. I was excited. Raw nuts are expensive and we just got about 5-6 pounds for free! But I've never shucked nuts before in my life. I wasn't aware how difficult those little suckers would be to open. The excitement ended when I picked up a nutcracker for the first time. LOL
Over the course of the next three months, Wes & I took shifts shucking them. We'd do a few handfuls at a time. Shuck nuts, hurt fingers, enjoy healthy snack, repeat. When we whittled down the amount in the paper grocery sack and had few enough left, we placed what was left in a Pyrex for storage. The time came for me to need to transport cupcakes to my Arbonne + RagsReborn party. The rest of the pecans had to go. Commence mass nutcracker pecan shucking party!
Text courtesy of Lacey.
After a night of labor, I was left with a rather large bowl of pecans. What to do with them? ...
The literal fruits of our labor.
Wes' brother gave me a really nice (and large) box of chocolates for Christmas. I brought them to Christmas dinner at my mom's but we didn't get a chance to open them because there were already plenty of desserts. So, Wes & I took the chocolates back home and put them away.
Fast forward almost two months ... today I remembered that I have a really nice box of unopened chocolate covered sea salt caramels just sitting in my kitchen waiting to be eaten. I had some for breakfast (they were delicious) and decided I wanted to use the rest for baking. I could have had more for breakfast but I didn't for the sake of my teeth and waistline.
There was only supposed to be 24 chocolates in the box but I got 25 when I opened it! Yay, bonus chocolate!
I really like those peanut butter cookies with the Hershey's kiss in the middle--well, more like on top. I think they're called "Chocolate Thumbprints". I also really like Turtle (aka caramel and nut... not the animal) flavored desserts. A former coworker of mine would always bring "Trailer Trash Turtles" to our company potlucks. They're pretzels with Rolo candies and pecans on top. I've never made either thumbprints or turtles before but I imagine they're both pretty easy. And the two could probably be combined into one master cookie. Using that as my inspiration, I decided to bake some cookies with the Christmas chocolate candies in the center & crushed pecans in the dough. This is my first time baking these* & the recipe is mostly made up, except I used a sugar cookie recipe from a baking cookbook to get the correct proportions (because baking without correct proportions is disastrous). Wish me luck!
*I will add adjustments to the recipe once I'm done baking...and if it's terrible, I'll just scrap this blog and post pictures of Sadie & Athena instead. LOL
Caramel stuffed cookie recipe:
Ingredients-
- 1/3 cup of granulated sugar*,
- 1/3 cup of brown sugar*,
*sugar cookies call for 1/2 cup each of brown & granulated sugars but I went with only 1/3 cup because I didn't want them to be too sweet with the candy in the center. The lesser amount of sugar did not affect the cookie texture or baking. - 1 stick of butter (at room temperature & softened),
- 1 egg,
- 1 1/4 cup of flour,
- 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda,
- chocolate caramel candies (make sure you have one per cookie; not all chocolates are shown in this picture),
- 1/4 cup of pecan pieces,
- a dash of nutmeg & a splash of vanilla (both are optional)
I was able to make 12 cookies from this recipe. The chocolates were pretty large (about 1 x 1 inch squares). The recipe should be able to make one and a half dozen cookies if the chocolate pieces were smaller.
1. Get a large mixing bowl and cream both sugars & butter. This is easiest to do with an electric mixer.
2. Once creamed, add egg, vanilla & nutmeg and mix together until everything is well blended.
3. In a separate smaller bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda & pecans.
4. Slowly add the flour mixture into the butter mixture. I always use one hand to pour while the other hand is mixing.
5. Wrap completed dough in Saran Wrap and refrigerate for an hour (more or less... I never time these things.) You can preheat the oven while waiting on the dough to chill. Preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
6. After chilling...time to make cookies!! Take a chocolate candy and wrap dough around it. The cookies will be little dough balls with candy in the center.
7. Place the balls onto a cookie sheet (you can grease the cookie sheet or use parchment paper but I have a Silpat and I LOVE it) and press down onto the balls until the tops are flat. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until golden brown.
8. Cool and enjoy!! (but don't cool for too long...these are best eaten warm so you can truly experience the gooey caramel center!)
These cookies turned out so well!! So so yummy!! Especially for being the first time I ever made them. I have impressed myself. LOL If I had to tweak the recipe, I'd use smaller pieces of chocolate candy and maybe only one type of sugar. And that's only because they turned out a little sweet for my taste.
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