Crescent Cookies

Blessings, Darlings!

Since I was too busy to blog during the Solstice Holiday Season I'm going to start the year blogging about cookies.

My family is pro cookie, and we bake.  The Chubby Hubby's cookie specialty is a recipe he got from his mother, Crescent Christmas Cookies.  I've no idea where his Mother got it from.  Family? A woman's magazine? A bag of flour? I bless whatever the source was!  Very rich, pleasantly sweet, pecan nutty, he makes a double batch because, while with a week of aging they become even better than when first baked, they are go good when first baked that one batch never survives the aging process!

Baking this year was complicated by the oven in the new-to-us house.  The temperature control in it is not particularly accurate.  I SO wish I had a digital thermometer to test it with,  but I used two analog oven thermometers in it when we first moved in.  Set at 350 F (and left to pre-heat for 20 minutes), one read 305 degrees, the other read 325 degrees.  Either way, the oven runs low when set at 350.  Set at 450, the oven thermometer team said it was far more accurate, one reading 450 one reading 445.  Alas, this recipe calls for baking at 325 degrees!

So we set the oven at 350, and ended up baking them longer than the recipe called for.  Rather like doing good BBQ, 'low and slow'!  They turned out particularly well.  I'm posting the recipe as we got it, but you might want to experiment with lower temperature/longer time baking if you try it yourself.

And, yes, you MUST do the creaming with your hands.  I tried making them myself at the end of 2009, using a blender.  They didn't hold their shape, baked up wrong, were miserable.

              CHRISTMAS CRESCENT COOKIES

 Ingredients:
1/2 pound butter                                            2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup sugar                                                 1 tablespoon water
2 cups flour, measured before sifting               1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped Pecans                                   Powdered sugar

Cream butter with hands.  Add sugar, vanilla, water, and cream them together, again with your hands.  Sift flour and salt together, then stir them into the butter mixture.  Add nuts and mix thoroughly.

To form the crescents, pick off a walnut-sized piece of dough, and roll it into a crescent shape.  Place on baking pan, spaced about an inch apart.

Bake 20 minute in a slow (325 degree) oven.  Removed when the 'points' of the crescents are lightly brown, but before the entire cookie is brown. They will be pretty delicate at this stage, place carefully on racks to cool a bit.  While still warm, roll in powdered sugar. 

Makes not nearly enough cookies.

Enjoy!

Frondly, Fern