SMS: Pecan Shortbread Cookies

This week’s SMS was chosen by Lara of The Lab: pecan shortbread cookies.  Or, as I like to call them, the cookies that would not look attractive in photos no matter how many times I tried 🙂  What they lacked in attractiveness, though, they more than made up for in ease of preparation.  The entire recipe can seriously be made in a food processor in about 5 minutes and the ingredient list is short, with pecans, butter and flour serving as the major players.

I feel like I say this every week, but once again, I scaled the recipe way back.  I bet I’d have to search my archives for quite a while to find an instance where I actually made the full SMS recipe.  With only two of us here, it rarely makes sense.  This week I made 1/4 of the recipe, which yielded 9 cookies.  I probably could have whipped up the dough in my mini prep had I thought about it but I didn’t until I’d already dirtied the full size food processor.  Though the recipe didn’t specifically instruct it, I pulsed the pecans in my food processor to chop them (instead of doing it by hand), then removed them to a bowl and proceeded with the rest of the recipe.  Given the small quantity of nuts I needed for 1/4 of the recipe it wouldn’t have been a big deal to chop them by hand, but why dirty a knife and cutting board when I didn’t have to? 

I’m not a huge fan of cookies with nuts (though I have had Mexican wedding cookies before which these reminded me of) and I’d rather save my calories for a different type of treat so I didn’t try the cookies.  I gave them to my neighbor and she did tell me they were quite good though!  I can comment on the texture – this type of cookies tends to be crumbly by nature but these were even more so than other similar recipes I’ve tried; the edges of a few of my cookies fell off when I rolled them in the confectioners’ sugar.  These probably aren’t something I’d make again, unless they were specifically requested, but that doesn’t speak to the recipe so much as my lack of passion for cookies with nuts, even if they are pretty finely ground.

Many thanks to Lara for hosting this week!  You can find the recipe on her blog or on page 84 of the Sweet Melissa Baking Book.