Orange pecan brown sugar cookies

I've decided that although I didn't exactly stick to my initial plan of baking everything in 'Rose's Christmas cookies', I'm still trying out new recipes, mostly of cookies, so the title of my blog still holds truth ;o). Which menas I can happily blog about any cookie I've tried which is what I'm doing!

This week I made the 'orange pecan brown sugar cookies from 'Big, fat, cookies' to try and make up for last week's disaster. The author describes how lovely her house smells whenever she makes these cookies and it sounded so appealing I wanted to accomplish that as well. These cookies have a lot of chopped pecans and plenty of orange zest to give them flavor. The dough contains no eggs and no leavening and is very easy to put together. I started baking the first batch, and even if Ms. Klivans prodicted a lot of spreading, I quickly feared that last week's spreading fest into pancake-like cookies was happening all over again. We talked about this problem extensively over at Fine Cooking's 'Cooks talk' where it was suggested to increase baking temperature to prevent spreading. So I quickly changed my oven setting from upper/lower heat to convection (as you're supposed to decrease the temperature about 20 degrees, as all cookbooks say) and left it at the same temp. And miracle of miracles: it worked!! The cookies spread less and stayed a cookie-like thickness. Even though sometimes, one of four on my sheet didn't want to behave and spread anyway (strange).
So I think they came out well, at least they looked very appetizing, see for yourself:



Now taste-wise, I was disappointed. Yes they are orange-y, and there's plenty of pecans too. I just thought they were very sweet and not all that interesting. My husband liked them fine, though they're not his favorite either.
I guess I should have changed the title of this blog into 'cookie book journey', because I think I'm ready to move on to another book. I'm glad I still have a lot to choose from :o).