These are brown sugar and butter cookies with toasted pecans folded through the dough. The mix of brown and white sugar gives a soft center with crisp edges, and toasting the pecans first makes them taste nuttier and less bitter.
Two things decide how they bake: how warm the butter is when you cream it, and how much flour ends up in the measuring cup.
One batch of dough makes about 36 cookies with a 1 tablespoon scoop. A different scoop changes the count, the bake time and the numbers per cookie, using USDA values for every ingredient:
| Scoop | Cookies per batch | Bake at 350°F | Calories each | Protein each |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 teaspoons | about 54 | 8 to 10 minutes | about 85 | 1.0 g |
| 1 tablespoon | about 36 | 10 to 12 minutes | about 127 | 1.5 g |
| 2 tablespoons | about 18 | 12 to 15 minutes | about 255 | 3.0 g |
At the 1 tablespoon size, each cookie also has about 8 g fat and 14 g carbohydrate. These are a dessert; the pecans add fat and fiber but only about 0.3 grams of protein per cookie.
Ingredients
- 1 cup chopped pecans
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened but still cool to the touch
- 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Mixing and baking
Toast the pecans. Spread them on a dry baking sheet and toast at 350°F for 7 to 8 minutes, stirring once, until fragrant. Let them cool completely; warm nuts soften the dough. Keep the oven at 350°F and line two baking sheets with parchment.
Cream. Beat the butter with both sugars on medium speed for 2 to 3 minutes, until lighter in color and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla.
Add the flour. Whisk the flour, baking soda and salt in another bowl. Add it to the butter mixture in two or three parts and mix only until no dry flour shows. Mixing past that point makes the cookies tough.
Scoop and bake. Fold in the pecans. Scoop the dough onto the sheets 2 inches apart and bake until the edges are golden and the centers look slightly underdone. Leave them on the sheet for 1 minute, then move them to a rack. They keep setting on the hot sheet.
- Flat and thin: the butter was too warm when it was creamed. Chill the dough for 30 minutes before baking.
- Dry and dense: the flour was scooped straight from the bag, or they baked too long. Spoon and level the flour and pull them at the low end of the bake time.
- Cakey: too much flour or egg. Measure the flour carefully, or use 2 yolks in place of 1 whole egg.
- Dark bottoms, pale edges: a dark baking sheet. Use a light aluminum sheet lined with parchment.
Make-ahead dough and storage
Scoop the dough into balls, freeze them on a lined sheet, then bag them. Bake straight from frozen at 350°F for 13 to 15 minutes for the 1 tablespoon size. Baked cookies keep in an airtight container for up to 5 days; a slice of sandwich bread in the container keeps them soft. Baked cookies also freeze for up to 2 months; thaw them at room temperature for an hour.
Dough kept at a steady 0°F stays safe while frozen, though USDA FSIS notes that quality declines over time.
Ingredient protein figures are based on USDA FoodData Central. How we calculate nutrition.
