Coffee pecan cookies

This recipe is adapted from Carol 自在生活

This recipe makes 80 cookies.

I love coffee, but I can not drink coffee 😦

So I love everything coffee, including coffee cake, coffee candy, coffee ice cream. My favorite is coffee cookies!

After I moved to the US, I realized it is actually Asian style cookie and hard to get even in Seattle (where there are a lot of Asian bakeries). So I decided to make my own.

My American friends love this cookie too! So I post it here for their convenience. Of course, everyone loves coffee, and for people who can not drink coffee like me, the cookie will satisfy your crave for coffee.

Ingredients:

• 240g unsalted butter (About 2 and 1/6 butter sticks if you buy from Costco :D. Please take them out from fridge and let it sit in room temperature for a while. It is ready to use when you can easily make a dent when you poke on it).
• 80g sugar (I use the raw sugar from Costco, which works well)
• 4 table spoons Instant coffee powder
• 4 table spoons heated milk ( I replace it with goat milk, which worked fine too.)
• 2 egg yolks
• 400g gluten-free flour (you can use regular flour. Please shorten the baking time to 15-18 minutes)
• 100g corn starch
• 200g pecans (I love pecans, but you can replace it with walnuts) In some recipe people prefer to toast nuts a little bit. I prefer to have raw nuts (to have a little bit nutrients in this guilty treat) but it is totally up to you.

I searched out all leftover instant coffee from my pantry….I realized that most instant coffee sold in the use are about half table spoon. So if you are using leftover like me, use 8 packages of instant coffee powder which will make 4 table spoons for the ingredients.

How to make it

Step 1

Heat up the milk, and pull the coffee powder into the milk. Mix them well and put on the side.

Step 2

Whip the soft butter well, then gradually add sugar. Whip the mixture till it is fluffy. You should see feather fluffy butter sticking out from your mixer, which looks like a pretty stalactite!

Step 3

Slowly add the coffee milk into the mixture. Please ensure you mix them very well before moving to the next step.

Step 4

Please use a sifter to filter flour and cornstarch, and add them into the mixture.

Step 5

Please use spatula (not the mixer if you are using regular flour please!) to blend the mixture as well as you can.

If you use regular flour (not gluten free one), please be careful not to over-blend it. It will be chewy if you blend it too much. If you use gluten free flours like me, there is no worry about it 😀

Step 6

Add pecan or walnuts into the mixture. Carefully blend them and avoid breaking nuts. I use hands since it is easier.

Step 7

Put a huge layer of plastic wrap on the counter, then take 1/4 part of the dough and put on it. Make a rectangular stick with about 1.5 inch on two shorter sides.

Then wrap it up using the plastic wrap and make it pretty. You should be able to make 4 of these blocks.

Step 8

It can be too soft to cut into pieces. So put the entire sticks into the freezer for about 1 hour.

After about 1 hour, please take out the dough from the freezer. The dough block should be hard enough to cut. We can cut it into 1/4 inch or about 0.5 cm (in thickness) cookie pieces.

If the block is still too hard to cut, please leave it in room temperature for a few minutes. The dough should be soft enough to cut in a few minutes.

Step 9

Preheat the oven to 325 fahrenheit degrees. Place your cookies on the cookie sheet on the tray. When the oven is ready, put it in and bake for 20-30 minutes total for gluten free cookies. For regular flour ones, please bake it for 15-18 minutes.

When the baking time passes half, please rotate the baking tray to ensure cookies are baked evenly.

Step 10

When cookies are cool, store them in sealed container right away to avoid humidity.

You can store unbaked cookie blocks in the freezer, and bake cookies when you want to eat them.

Hope you enjoy this kind of cookies as much as I do!