TWD Rewind: Brown Sugar Pecan Shortbread

I had a long weekend from school with lots of time to get things done and I also accomplished some baking as well. I don't know if I'll eventually rewind all of the TWD posts (it would be great if I did but I'm realistic) but I do have a "short list" of recipes that I want to rewind soon. One of them was the Brown Sugar Pecan Shortbread. I wanted to make this recipe because it was the first ever TWD recipe and I figure that makes it eminently rewind-able. All the way back on January 1, 2008 TWD made this recipe! Also, I happened to have everything that I needed to make them without a special trip to the grocery store. I have sort of mixed feelings about shortbread. It's a really rich and buttery cookie so one is great, two are good, but after that I'm done. True to form, these cookies are rich and buttery but I definitely enjoyed them more than your average shortbread. Dorie is right, the brown sugar gives them a lovely caramel flavor and the pecans are the perfect nut to use in these cookies. I have to admit, I pondered dipping them in chocolate. I think that they'd be great with a little bit of chocolate on them. However, I managed to restrain myself and I saved some for me and gave the rest to the nice people who work in the English department office.


The dough is very easy to put together: you just mix it up and pop it into a freezer bag to roll it out and then chill it. And here's where Dorie Greenspan really impresses me: in all of her cookie recipes that I have tried so far, she very adeptly manages to avoid using extra bench flour to roll out the dough. This is great because the dough doesn't get tough or lose any of its flavor because it has all of that extra flour hanging around. In this case, you roll out the dough in a freezer bag and then you put it in the fridge to chill for at least 2 hours but up to 2 days (I love recipes that have this amount of flexibility built in!). Then you take scissors and cut the bag away from the dough. I used a pizza cutter to cut the square of dough into smaller squares.

As you can see from the picture, haste makes waste and all that jazz. I probably should have a) rechilled the dough after I cut it and poked it and b) paid closer attention when I put them in the oven because they got a little too brown but, no matter, they tasted great anyway. They weren't burned at all, they're just much browner than the cookies that are shown in the book. I will definitely make these again at some point. They're simple to make and very tasty!