Snowball Cookies

Alright, I’m making a public announcement here, just for the record… I have never made these cookies before. Granted, there’s a few things I’ve never made before that are put up here, but if it’s super delicious I just say ‘hey, this worked out!’

So I made these cookies, and the ‘batter’ came out like.. sand, really. You know when you make a pie crust and they say to cut in the butter until the dough makes little pebbles? Well this made.. pebbles, but really tiny pebbles. I’m not sure if that’s ‘normal’, but I went with it! And, honestly, even if it’s not ‘normal’, I thought these were perfectly tasty. Could they have been ‘better’? Maybe! But I’ve never eaten a snowball cookie, so I don’t know what it’s supposed to be like, so I can only say from this one experience that I thought they were tasty! I have seen pictures where people use a cookie scoop to scoop them up and.. yeah, that would have just been a pile of ‘cookie dirt’ on the sheet. How I POSSIBLY messed these up, I don’t know as I was very precise in the way that I measured the flour because this recipe actually came with a warning on how they’d be dry if you didn’t measure the flour with the spoon method. Yup.. I used a spoon to measure the flour. None the less, I do recommend, if not for these cookies but other cookies, a scoop which is super handy.

OXO Good Grips Medium Cookie Scoop

Hey, this is a big step considering I’m an ‘eyeballing’ type person who guesstimates how much of something goes in a recipe, so I know I followed it! But, for the sake of sparing you some ‘sandy’ dry ‘batter’, I’m going to make a slight change to the flour which, in my opinion, can’t hurt. I’ll make these again and give you an update on how that changes the texture of the cookies.

ANYWAY…. let’s get down to the cookies.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Since I have a convection oven and wanted to put more than one sheet in at a time, I put it on convection bake at 325.

Cream your butter and powdered sugar together until well mixed. Once that’s done, just add in the vanilla until it’s well incorporated and each of those cookies gets a little taste of that delicious vanilla flavor.

Now we’re going to add the flour, mixing gently so we don’t overwork the dough. Just make sure you get all your butter and flour mixed together. I am told that it’s important to not scoop the flour from its source into your measuring cup because this compacts the flour and then you have a dry cookie, so if you’re worried about that, just spoon the flour into your measuring cup to measure it out.

Once that’s done, we’re going to stir in our chopped pecans. I had pecan halves and since this is supposed, from what I understand, be like a pecan sandy cookie in a ball form, I just tossed my halves into the Ninja Professional Blender with Nutri Ninja Cups (BL660) and gave them a few bursts. This made some ‘pecan dust’, which might…MIGHT have affected the dough a little, as well as some pecan pieces. Honestly, I think having the dust in the cookie was a good move because you can really taste the pecan flavor!

Now that it’s all been brought together, you should have a crumbly dough. Mine was SANDY, not crumbly, which as I’ve mentioned, was probably a little on the dry side for this cookie, but worry not, I already cut back the flour a tad in your ingredients list. I gave you a close up of my pecans and my dough after the flour had been added so you can see the texture of what mine came out to be like.

Now we’re going to roll these into balls about 1 inch in diameter. Mine didn’t roll, so I pressed them, which made them.. bumpy with fingerprints and not all pretty and professional smooth like a ‘snowball. But hey… no one will question if they’re homemade!

Place them on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Don’t worry, they won’t spread out, so just put a little space between them and cram that cookie sheet up! Since I didn’t know if they’d spread, I spaced mine out, but I found out during the second batch that I wasted a lot of cookie baking space.

Now I baked mine on 325 (convection oven) for 12 minutes. This was until they were basically set up and had a very small touch of brown on the bottoms and on some of my finger indentation ridges I left behind which marked these cookies as HOMEMADE. They don’t get brown unless you overcook them (yes.. I overcooked about 4), so don’t wait for these babies to brown up completely or they’re going to be a bit..overly crunchy. Regular oven at 350, the recipe calls for 15 minutes. I don’t know if that’s just going to cremate them so just be diligent and watch them from the 10 minute mark on, just in case!

Once done, place the cookies on cooling racks. Once they’re WARM and not oven hot, we’re going to take them, one at a time, and put them in the bowl with the extra powdered sugar, coating them. I put some foil beneath my cooling rack so I’d not have powdered sugar everywhere. And, once the cookies are cooled completely, we’ll dust them one last time. We dust them when they’re warm because the sugar will melt into the buttery cookie a little to give it some sticky surface for the second dusting, just in case you were wondering.

After their second dusting, you simply grab some nice cold milk or a hot cup of coffee or tea, and enjoy!

Overall, I found these to be perfectly tasty made the way I made them, but if you are a snowball connoisseur then I’m sure you’ll have some criticizing for my (MAYBE DRY) cookies, but hopefully the flour adjustment I’ve made will have these delicious little pecan cookies tasting glorious!