Honey Almond Cookies with Raisins and Walnuts

Gather together all the ingredients. This recipe will require 1 cup of butter, 3/4 cups each of brown and white sugar, 1 cup of raisins, 1 cup of walnuts, 1 cup of almonds, 2 eggs, 2.25 cups of flour, 1 tsp of baking powder, some honey (not pictures), and a pinch of salt. Ignore the vanilla. I don't know how that got there.

Put the almonds into your food processor . . .

. . . and chop them finely.

Regret buying walnuts in the shell instead of the more convenient shelled walnuts. Seriously, bad move there.

How on earth do we extricate something edible out of this?

Ok, this is a lot like putting a egg in your hand and trying to crush it. You usually can't, unless you have a pressure concentration point, such as a ring. The idea here is to use the point where the two walnuts are tangent to each other as a pressure point, and crush one walnut open against the other.

It works. Physics triumphs again.

After wasting a silly amount of time opening all of the walnuts and separating them from their shells, resolve to go to price club and buy 5 pounds of shelled walnuts for 38 cents.

Put the sugars and the butter in your stand mixer.

Cream the sugar and the butter together. The idea is that the sugar crystals will act as an abrasive to help chop up the butter to make for a very smooth mixture.

Add the eggs, salt, and baking powder.

Mix that up and add as much honey as makes you happy.

Add the flour slowly and with the mixer on the slowest setting so as to avoid ejecting it all into the air and making a giant mess all over the kitchen.

Add the raisins . . .

. . . and the almonds and walnuts.

scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Divide the dough evenly into two 9"x11" baking pans (I use half steam trays, as they are cheaps as could be).

Bake those at about 350 Fahrenheit until golden brown.

Slice into squares for optimal sharing.