PECAN SANDIE COOKIE DOUGH

• I don’t know about you, but I love the smell of browning butter

• The open air refrigerator (that means outside) did a beautiful job super chilling the butter.

• Grinding the pecans, flour and all the rest to a coarse grind seemed counter intuitive, knowing that I would be rolling the dough. Wouldn’t the coarse nuts make rolling the dough difficult? I didn’t realize that we would be rolling the dough ⅜ inch thick. That’s really thick–almost ½ inch.

• Still, the dough was rough and craggy, but it held together well enough.

• I really had to knead it well to get it to hold. I worried that I was ruining the texture over working the dough like this. I chilled the dough overnight.

ROLL THE DOUGH AND CUT THE COOKIES

• I felt mathematically challenged trying to figure out ⅜ inch thickness. I was confusing 1/8th for 1/16th and I must have taken me 15 minutes to figure it out. I was grateful to own a set of Pastry Wands because I had no feel for 3/8 inch thickness.

BAKING THE PECAN SANDIES

• My batch only made 24 of the most delicious cookies. So delicious.

• WHAT ARE THE ALPHA BAKERS? : Here’s how it works: once a week, for the next two years, 25 Alpha Bakers commit to baking their way through every recipe of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s newly published The Baking Bible. Each week we post our experiences on our blog sites: our successes, our failures, our likes and dislikes. The recipes are scheduled in advance so that everyone will be baking the same recipe at the same time. Unfortunately, no recipes can be shared in my Alpha Bakers posts due to publishing restrictions. But, if you love to bake, The Baking Bible is a must-have book. You can see other tutorials for the same recipe at the following link The Baking Bible Alpha Bakers at http://rosesalphabakers.blogspot.ca/.