Pecan Puffs

We make a lot of Christmas cookies for a couple who do no major holiday entertaining. We do, however, send our cookies through the mail and hand deliver a number of goody boxes around Christmas time to friends and family - at least those family who do not have access to the even greater bounty of baked goods which issues from my mother. Those family members are her responsibility - sorry. These cookies do crumble in their own specific ways, after all.

As it happens anyway, most of the Christmas cookies that Mariam and I make are derived somehow from recipes passed to me by my mother.  Baking is its own special kind of cooking, requiring a skillset that I feel does not really intersect entirely with that afforded by experience in other cooking. My mother is a more sophisticated and better baker than either of us, so as yet, we can mostly do little more than follow directions and hope for the best. The following recipe is a favorite of ours, and also quite easy, so we haven't yet had anything but the best in preparing it.


We call these things pecan puffs because that's what we've always called them. That's just their name. The standard incarnation contains, as you might expect, pecans, and as for the puff, that is likely to do with the powdered sugar which goes absolutely everywhere if you are unwise enough to exhale while biting into one. However, we make them with other nuts as well, and when we do they're still called pecan puffs. They just become the pistachio pecan puffs, or the walnut pecan puffs. It's about as confusing as it sounds.

In any case, in addition to pecans, we do strongly recommend making a couple batches or half batches of these with different nuts to get different flavors. We've had especially good results with pistachios, but walnuts are good, too, and though we haven't tried it yet, I think hazelnuts would work very well, too. An important note about using pistachios: pistachios are a drier, less fatty nut than the pecans this recipe was designed for, so it's wise to add about two tablespoons extra butter to account for this.

Pecan Puffs

Yield: About four dozen cookies
Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tbsp water
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 cups pecans (or nut of choice), ground
• extra powdered sugar for rolling

Cooking Directions

1. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter with an electric mixer. To this add the powdered sugar, vanilla, and water, and mix well.
   
2. Add the flour, salt, and ground nuts, mixing as you go. As with any dough mixing, this can be a workout, and adding everything at once is probably not the best option. Folding the flour and nuts in a bit at a time works best for us.
   
3. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.
4. When you're ready to make your cookies, preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. Form the cookies by rolling little balls from the dough about the size of a walnut. Place these on an ungreased metal cookie sheet - don't worry too terribly about spacing, as these cookies will not expand when baking. Bake for an hour.
   
5. When they come out of the oven, allow them to cool a few minutes on the sheet. Then, while they're still warm, roll them in powdered sugar to coat them completely, and place them on racks to complete cooling.