Chocolate Chip Pecan Bar Cookies

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Who doesn’t love a good chocolate chip cookie? I’m not always a fan of chocolate chip cookies being contaminated by nuts, but sometimes the cravings call for chocolate chip cookies with nuts.

For a second, before I dive into the inspiration behind these pecan chocolate chip cookie bars, I want to talk about something that’s been bothering me lately: people stealing bloggers’ photographs and claiming them as their own. There are entire sites filled with stolen content if you can believe it.  Fortunately, those sites seem to regularly get shut down and slapped with hefty fines. As if that’s not irritating enough, we have a whole other type of content thief: the home baker who periodically sells their confections’ to friends and family. While nobody owns a design for a cake, cookie, or even cupcake, somebody does own the photograph you’ve stolen and claimed as your own.

I have a couple of acquaintances who do this all the time! Sometimes, to be snarky, I’ll ask for the link to the blog where the photo was from because that particular recipe looks tasty and I want to try it. Usually, they either remove the photo or block me from seeing the photo, or claim the photo as their own when we all know damn well it’s not. What’s so freaking hard about sharing a photo, crediting the original source and saying, “I just made this cake recipe and it’s delicious!”?

In a way, it makes me somewhat happy that I’m still learning about food styling and have been too cheap, I mean lazy, to upgrade my camera to something that will produce higher quality images.  Yay for mediocrity!

Alright, with that mini rant out of the way, I can get back to these delicious pecan chocolate chip bar cookies. As I shared in my crunchy peanut butter cookie post, I’m sharing one cookie recipe a month for 2018 to honor my mother-in-law, and these bar cookies were one of her go-to recipes to feed a crowd. I think that’s the purpose of bar cookies; they’re easy to transport, and they’re perfect for a potluck, dinner party, or a casual afternoon bbq with friends.

In her original recipe, she used a mixture of pecans and walnuts—I’ve omitted the walnuts because I’m not a huge fan of chocolate chip cookies with walnuts in them. It’s just... unnatural to me to put two things together that I don’t enjoy together. Actually, that’s not entirely true because somewhere, hidden in my stash of recipes is a drop dead gorgeous chocolate tart that has walnuts in it. Walnuts and booze. mmmm