Pistachio Butter Balls

If you saw any of my tweets today you may have noticed that I was going to decorate sugar cookies today and I still will.  I’m procrastinating right now though.  I know what I want to do with the cookies, I just have to decide exactly how I will go about doing it.  The cookies are for Ella’s party this weekend.  She celebrated her 9th birthday in Niagara Falls yesterday while on vacation with her family.   On Saturday she will have a get together with a few of her friends and I’m bringing the cookies.  I’ve not decorated cookies before in the manner that I plan on doing these ones and because they have to be done free-hand while the base icing is still wet there’s no room for mistakes.  Hence my procrastination.  I’ll get to them once I’m comfortable feeling that I can complete the planned designs I want to do on them.  Until then, I’m filling my day with reading blogs, tweeting, laundry and I just decided to write this post to share two new cookies I made last week.

Before I get to the cookies I have to tell you what else has been taking up a few hours of my days of late (and to further extend my procrastination period) .   WEEDS!  The only thing that grew well during our hot dry summer was weeds.  In fact, they took over our property and when the grass made a resurrection after a few desperately needed rainfalls, Ron and I knew that we had to get down and yank up the prolific interlopers.  Our home sits on an acre and a half of property.  Most of the back is wooded, the front and two sides are surrounded by trees but there is a lot of lawn.  I’m getting to know almost every inch of it intimately.  We’ve both been weeding for a little over a week now and we are seeing progress. As long as we don’t look up, just concentrate on the sections we are working on, it feels that we will master the weeds before the end of the summer.  Below is a picture of one section of the front yard before we started getting down and dirty with these pesky blights on our landscape.

I’ve never seen so many weeds, big and small so clustered together over such a large area.  You can weed in one tiny section and pull up over twenty weeds!

Here is the most of same section after countless loads of a 5 gallon bucket were filled with more types of weeds than I knew existed.

Please tell me you can see a difference!  You know, in some ways I’m finding that weeding is addictive.  As much as my knees, hands and back know that they have been working hard, I find that it is hard to know when to stop.  Everywhere you look there are weeds yet to be pulled and as I raise my tired (not 35 by a long shot anymore) body up from the ground and say *I’m done, enough for today*, I always end up stooping over to pull out another big weed, and *Oh look!  There’s five more right here I’ll just pull before I hit the shower…oooh, there’s a big one, I’ll get it but that’s it!  I’m done, really I am*  I suspect it will be  like that for at least another week, if not more.

You know what else is addictive?  Pistachio Butter Balls.  I kind of thought that they would be, given how much I love pistachios but until I made them last week I had no idea how much I’d love these cookies.

With a large bag of pistachios in the cupboard which I had made a good dent in over a few evenings, I decided that they just might make a good cookie too.  They did!

I loved these Pecan Butter Balls and have been making them ever since Barb at Creative Culinary posted her recipe.  In fact I made a batch to take with me when I visited my son and his family last week.  He’s been on leave from Afghanistan for the past few weeks and returns there on Sunday.   A batch of my Pistachio Butter Balls also went to his home.

I used the same recipe as the Pecan Butter Balls, just swapped out the pecans for the pistachios.  I roasted the pistachios just as I do the pecans.  Once your batter is all ready, roll them into 1″ balls and place on a parchment lined cookie sheet.

Let the baked cookie balls cool for about a minute.

Then roll them in confectioner’s sugar.  You can re-roll again once the cookies have completely cooled.

Then go ahead, try and eat just one.

Pistachio Butter Balls

Ingredients

• 1 cup of salted butter (if using unsalted, add 1/4 teaspoon of salt to your flour)
• 4 tablespoons of sugar
• 2 tablespoons of vanilla bean paste
• 2 cups of  unbleached flour
• 2 cups of shelled pistachios, toasted for 5-7 minutes in 350 degree oven (just until  you can start to smell the nuts from the heat), cool.
• Confectioner’s sugar

Preparation

• Finely chop the toasted pistachios.
• Cream butter and sugar. Add vanilla bean paste and mix until thoroughly combined.
• Add flour (and salt if used) and mix thoroughly.
• Add pistachios incorporating into dough; using a paddle attachment or your hands.
• Refrigerate 30 minutes.  Can be made the night before.  Refrigerate and then let sit at room temperature for 30 minutes before rolling dough.
• Roll into 1-inch balls and place one inch apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 15-20 minutes at 375 degrees until set but not brown. Remove from oven and let set for 1 minute.
• Roll in confectioner’s sugar.
• Roll again if desired when cool.

The same day I made the Pistachio Butter Balls, I tried another cookie recipe I saw on Angelyn’s Everyday Desserts site.  Brownie cookies.  They were very tasty too.

She warns you that the batter is very runny and it was.

I actually poured the batter into a measuring cup and pour the cookies onto the baking sheet.  I just found it easier and much less messier than scooping the batter out by spoonfuls.

O.K. then.  I think I’ve procrastinated enough.  Time to get some piping and flooding icing ready and face the music with those birthday party cookies.

How about you?  Have you ever procrastinated when it comes to baking or decorating something?

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