Back in August I was excited when the brand new Great British Bake Off book to accompany series 5 came out: The Great British Book Of Baking.  Being at home for the summer holidays off work from my teaching assisting and teaching I have more time to bake and enjoy my obsession.  Biscuits and cookies are my absolute favourites to bake but unfortunately they don’t do much good for my figure though.  I couldn’t resist creating these little lovelies though.

In the Biscuits and Traybakes chapter of the book there is a wonderful recipe for Pecan Shorties.  As I love shortbread biscuits, pecans and plain chocolate, this combination sounded wonderful.  I just HAD to try these out!

The weather was cold and rainy, the kids were up in their rooms doing what teenagers do so I set to in my kitchen to try and create something magic.  First things first was to chop and lightly toast the pecan nuts.

Once this was done I creamed butter and icing sugar together in a large mixing bowl.  The icing sugar instead of caster sugar gives it a lovely crumbly but short texture.  After that I added in some vanilla extract then some plain flour until it was mixed into a dough.  The pecans were folded into the dough last of all.

The dough was then carefully divided into twenty pieces.  Each piece was then rolled into a ball and placed well apart on a lined baking sheet.  The cookies were flattened slightly and then baked in the oven for roughly between 12-15 minutes.  I kept a close eye on the oven- nothing worse than burnt cookies!

Once the finished cookies were out of the oven I let them cool on my wire rack and then melted some chocolate to dip the shortbreads into.  I used a bar of dark chocolate which was about 70% cocoa solids (Green and Blacks). I then let the chocolate set on the cookies before telling my kids there were cookies around!

I’m ashamed to say I pigged out on these beauties.  I couldn’t stop at one and they were delicious.  I’d love to try them again but this time using chopped stem ginger instead of pecan nuts.  Or white chocolate would be a great variation!

Happy Baking!

Love Sam xx