Holiday Chocolate Chip Praline Pecan Brown Sugar Cookies

One reason I love the holiday season is all the delicious food, including the many many desserts. I am not even that much of a “sweets person”, but something about the holidays makes me want sweets even more. My favorites tend to be cookies and pies. Oh, and I can’t forget my grandmothers famous rice pudding. Yum!

Another ingredient I love is brown sugar, aka sugar mixed with molasses. I love the flavor it adds to desserts that regular white sugar can sometimes lack. While I call our Brown Sugar cookies a holiday sweet, they definitely can be made year-round!

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Candied vs. Praline vs. Glazed Pecans

People tend to use these words interchangeably when referring to basically sweetened pecans. Technically speaking, candied pecans typically are made using white sugar and an egg white and are roasted in the oven. Glazed pecans are similar but use brown sugar, cornstarch instead of an egg white and butter. Finally we have praline pecans that are typically coated in a caramel like sugar mixture.

For our recipe, we are doing a quick skillet version. You could also roast them in the oven for some more crunch but I find the skillet version to be a quick and easy alternative.

Simply melt 1-2 tbsp of butter in a pan with brown sugar, cinnamon and vanilla until you have a creamy consistency. Next add your pecans and mix until coated. Line a plate or surface with parchment paper and spread out your pecans. Allow to cool and harden for 30 minutes and done!

Melted Butter vs. Room Temperature Butter

There are some cookie recipes that may call for melted butter, however for this recipe we will be using room temperature butter. But we don’t want the butter to be too soft. Slightly soft to the touch but still a bit firm. I have found when I use melted butter or butter that is too warm, the cookies spread much more and are more thin. This is not the type of cookie we are looking for with this recipe.

Refrigerating your dough

I have had issues in the past with my cookies coming out flat. My first mistake was having my butter too warm, as mentioned above, and then I discovered my dough was also too warm. For this recipe, I refrigerated my dough for an hour but you could also get away with 30 minutes. Once they were scooped and placed on my baking sheet, I also popped them in the fridge for another 10 minutes just to be safe. After that, my cookies turned out perfectly!

Helpful Baking Tools

I find it super helpful to use a stand mixer or hand mixer when mixing your sugar and eggs. It gives it a much creamier consistency which is what we want. You can however totally get away with mixing by hand as long as you do a thorough job.

My favorite hand mixer:

My favorite baking tools:

Ingredients

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Ingredients we used for this recipe:

• Vanilla
• 1 Egg
• Organic Butter
• Baking Soda
• Brown Sugar

Save some for later!

It is just Mike and I at home so I typically don’t need as many cookies as this recipes yields, approximately 30 cookies. While we can definitely eat that many, it’s best we don’t haha. What I do is make the whole batch and roll out all of my cookies. I then place the cookie dough balls in the freezer, on a plate or tray not touching each other, and let them freeze for about 20-30 minutes. Once they hardened, I transfer them to a Stasher bag or glass container and keep them in the freezer. Now I have fresh homemade cookies ready whenever we’d like, yay!

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