These butter pecan shortbread cookies should come with a warning. You cannot stop with just one …or three.

Between the butter and the pecans, these shortbread cookies just melt in your mouth. The hardest part of these cookies (for me) was to form small rounded shortbread cookie dough into a hedgehog.

This is not my first time to make animal theme desserts using pecans. These are my favorite turtle recipe.

I made a second batch to practice making hedgehog bums.

After two batches I decided my shortbread hedgehog cookies looked more like non-descript woodland creatures.

Either way, these pecan filled cookies taste amazing and are a fun cookie to serve or bring to a party.

I made a second batch to try to give them bigger bums.

I almost called these shortbread woodland creatures since these cookies could be either hedgehogs or porcupines. You could call these cookies any type of nocturnal critter and no one would care. Why?

Because the classic butter and pecans base in these cookies taste amazing!

No one is going to comment about the size of the hedgehog’s bum.

The recipe for these butter pecan shortbread hedgehog cookies is below.

Here are a few notes on what I would do on my next batch.

Double the batch. Just do it.
I used what I had on hand and who knew I had chocolate sprinkles in the pantry. However, I would use smaller chocolate chips for the eyes. My hedgehogs resemble our Berner rescue, Elliott. A little wide-eyed and wonky. #elliottthebernerrescue
Use a spoon to flatten the hedgehog’s face. This is supposed to make their bums look bigger.

No matter how the hedgehog bums turn out, these butter pecan shortbread cookies are delicious.