Chocolate Pecan Butter

I was browsing Tasty Kitchen, you know cause I was killin time, and I came across a recipe for Salted Chocolate pecan butter. The recipe is from Jessica of the How Sweet it is blog. I really like this blog so I thought I'd give it a try.

The recipe got really rave reviews, but didn't turn out so well for me. I think the biggest problem was that the oil in the nuts separated and I could not get it back in. You can see from the photo below just how oily the spread was.
I stirred and stirred this stuff. No luck what so ever. What went wrong? Maybe I just needed to stick the whole thing back into the food processor. Maybe I mixed it up for too long in there. Maybe because I roasted the pecans it released too many oils. I don't know. I do know that with the oil separated it was next to impossible to spread on toast.
I couldn't get Mrblocko or Blockette to eat it. Not even a taste. It just looked so unappealing. It tasted OK, but it was nothing I wanted to eat on a regular basis. So what was I going to do with all this pecan butter?

I make peanut butter cookies all the time, so why not use this pecan butter in place of peanut butter? I used the same recipe from Baking Bites that I used to make Dark Chocolate Flourless peanut butter Cookies. My Pecan butter yielded just over 1/2 c so I used regular smooth peanut butter to equal the cup of spread needed in the recipe. Because of all the oil in the Pecan Butter, these cookies spread out a lot more than their full peanut butter counterparts. Their texture was also very different from the original. The original recipe yields a very grainy, crumbly cookie. These cookies were thin and chewy. The cookies lasted a week in our house and remained soft and chewy the entire time.

Although no one in our family really cared for the pecan butter, everyone loved the cookies. I mentioned that the cookies lasted a week in our house, but that was only because I hid them in the pantry!

Salted Chocolate Pecan Butter from How sweet it is
1 cup Pecans
1-½ Tablespoon Organic Cocoa Powder
¼ teaspoons Vanilla Extract
2 Tablespoons Maple Syrup, More If Needed
¼ teaspoons Course Sea Salt

In a food processor, add pecans and pulse until smooth. Add cocoa powder and pulse until combined. Add vanilla and drizzle in maple syrup until desired consistency is reached. Add sea salt 1/4 teaspoon at a time, tasting after each addition. Feel free to add more syrup or salt depending on taste and consistency.