Peanut Pecan Cookies

These Peanut Pecan Cookies are baked Levain Bakery style—thick with a soft, gooey middle. They’re the fun cousin of the peanut butter cookie with a base of Big Spoon Roasters Peanut Pecan nut butter. You’ll be addicted to these cookies after you make them!

Why should I make these Peanut Pecan Cookies?

I’m telling you, you haven’t had a homemade cookie quite like this one. If you like soft, perfectly baked, nutty cookies with a bit of mix-ins, you’re in the right place.

These peanut pecan cookies are baked Levain Bakery-style which means they are extra large cookies, baked from frozen to achieve a super tall, thick and soft cookie with the perfect bake.

The flavors in these peanut pecan cookies are pretty special. I am an ambassador for Big Spoon Roasters because I am a total nut butter enthusiast, and I honestly believe they’re making the best quality nut butters you’re going to find on the market! 

Their peanut pecan nut butter was the very inspiration for this cookie, so naturally we’ll be using a healthy amount of it in our cookie!

Big Spoon Roasters Peanut Pecan Nut Butter

So you know how peanut butter is delicious and cashew butter is magical but how you generally just wish someone was making more interesting nut butters than just peanut, almond and cashew?

I have a solution to all of those problems—it’s Big Spoon Roasters!

With nut butters like the Peanut Pecan one we’re using today, Sweet Heat (a spicy peanut butter, yum!), Lemon Cookie, Pistachio Crunch, Lum Lum Thai Curry and Seasonal Espresso, they really are unmatched in the nut butter world! 

The Peanut Pecan nut butter was the first recipe that Mark Overbay ever created for Big Spoon Roasters which makes this Peanut Pecan Cookie recipe pretty special in my opinion.

Head on over to the Big Spoon Roasters website and order using my discount code AMBASSADOR-KARIS10 for 10% off of your orders! 

What are Levain-style cookies?

The viral Levain cookie has become its very own style of cookie in the dessert world. At Levain Bakery in New York City, they take a delicious cookie and use the science of baking to elevate it into something worth talking about. 

Their cookies are about 2 inches thick in the middle, meaning they maintain a soft almost gooey center that is of course, packed with delicious fillings and mix-ins. Normal cookies are most often best within the first day or two of being baked. Levain-style cookies last longer in my opinion because they retain so much more moisture than the average cookie.

The key to making these Peanut Pecan Cookies Levain-style

I played around with different chilling times and oven temperatures to get these cookies perfectly thick, soft and oozy-gooey! If you follow the recipe exactly as it’s written you’ll get the same delicious results I did.

During the mixing process, it’s important to switch to a spatula after you cream together the butter and sugars. Mixing with a spatula instead of a hand or stand mixer helps us control the amount of air we’re adding to the batter, which affects the final texture.

In order to get a cookie that’s roughly 2” thick in the middle, we need to scoop more than the average amount of cookie dough! So instead of a regular 2” cookie scoop, we use a 1” cookie scoop and create 3” cookie dough balls.

The key is to bake these Peanut Pecan Cookies from frozen. Like, completely frozen. They must rest for at least 5 hours but preferably overnight in the freezer if you want them to turn out exactly right! 

The second key is that you MUST let them rest on the baking sheet for at least 20 minutes after you pull them out of the oven. They finish baking and solidifying during those 20 minutes on the hot sheet pan.

After all of my testing, I found that baking the cookies from frozen with an oven temperature of 350F for 12 minutes and resting for 20 minutes out of the oven yields the best results. 

You will be tempted to skip the overnight chilling or the 20 minute rest time after baking, but I recommend following my instructions if you want the results I’ve mentioned! 

 

How to make these Peanut Pecan Cookies

To make these peanut pecan cookies you’ll need:

Big Spoon Roasters Peanut Pecan Nut Butter

Unsalted Butter

Granulated Sugar 

Brown Sugar

Cage Free Egg

Vanilla

All Purpose Flour

Baking Soda

Salted Peanuts

Pecans

Optional: Dark Chocolate Chips

1. With a hand mixer beat together the butter and the sugars until light and fluffy (about 2-3 minutes)
2. Add in the egg, vanilla and Big Spoon Roasters Peanut Pecan Nut Butter and mix by hand using a spatula. 
3. Once everything is mixed in, add the flour and the baking soda and mix again with the spatula. 
4. Lastly, roughly chop some salted peanuts and pecans and mix them into the batter.
5. Scoop 3 scoops of cookie dough with a 1” cookie scoop to create 3” balls of cookie dough.
6. Optionally, top each ball of dough with a few extra peanuts, pecans and a few dark chocolate chips if you have them on hand.
7. Freeze the cookie dough for at least 5 hours but preferably overnight. 
8. Once completely frozen, bake the cookies at 350F for 12 minutes. *They will not look fully done when you remove them from the oven. This is okay.
9. Remove the peanut pecan cookies from the oven and allow them to rest of the hot baking tray for at least 20 minutes before touching them. 
10. Serve and enjoy! 

How to plan ahead to make these Peanut Pecan Cookies

I recommend taking 2 days to make these peanut pecan cookies. Just prep the dough the day before you want to bake them so that you don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re fully frozen and ready to bake.

Can baking be therapeutic?

I often talk about baking being a therapeutic hobby but I’d like to share more about why I feel that way as well as how it can become a relaxing hobby for you! When I bake, it’s my creative time. I may put on my favorite nostalgic movie or tv show in the background, or a Spotify playlist titled “French café” and leave my troubles behind.

Sometimes I pour myself a glass of wine and light a candle. Then, with the mood set, the mixing of batter, kneading of dough and smoothing of icing is my only care in the world.

When I say baking is therapeutic, sometimes people respond saying “not for me it isn’t!” I completely understand why someone might feel that way. There have been plenty of times where I spend hours on something only for it to fail or something breaks that shouldn’t or I forget to clean as I go and am left with a disastrous kitchen to clean.

So I should in reality, have a caveat to my “baking as therapy” claims…

Baking is therapy when you curate the experience to be relaxing.

How do you curate that relaxing experience for yourself, you ask?

How to make baking therapeutic…

1.  Prepare your mind–know that it’s okay if the cake doesn’t rise, or the butter wasn’t chilled enough. Shift your mindset from seeing your failures as mistakes to seeing them as opportunities for learning.
2. Prepare your space–I cannot and will not bake on top of a messy kitchen. If I were to do this I would be starting from a place of stress! Take an extra 10 minutes to clean any dishes in the sink and wipe down the counters, this small effort will pay you back greatly in brain space and clarity.
3. Clean as you go! I’ll tell you the one way to make baking stressful and tiresome, is to not clean as you go! After I use each ingredient that I no longer need, I put it away.

After each major step in the process, I wipe down the counters and put dishes that are no longer needed in the sink.If there is chill time or baking time I don’t sit, I do the cleaning then. Make this shift and you’ll really notice the difference!

By the way, this last tip really helped me when I was on The Great American Baking Show–and the crew that cleaned up behind us made a point to tell me that my workspace was always so clean they didn’t have much to do! 

I would reply by saying “it’s how I stay sane in this tent!”

Additional suggestions:

*Maybe try printing off the recipe instead of looking at it on your phone, tablet or laptop and use this time to unplug from technology for a few hours.

**Invite friends or family over to share your baking creation with you. Time spent with loved ones over food is a universally special experience!

That’s how I discovered baking for my mental health. If you try any of these suggestions, let me know how it went for you! I’m really invested in spreading this message to others in hopes that baking will enhance your lives more than it already does!

If you make these Peanut Pecan cookies, please DM or tag me on social media @karisscorner or email me karisscorner@gmail.com with photos! I love seeing my recipes baked up in your kitchens!

If you love the Peanut Pecan Cookies, try my Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe!

Happy Nutty Baking!