Snow Day Snowball Cookies [Recipe]

When you're a kid, there are few things better than a snow day, especially when there's lots of good snow outside to play with...until of course you get too cold, or your big brother gets snow in your eye, or you are just generally being cranky.

That's when it's time to forget the real snowballs, and head inside to spend your snow day making snowball cookies!

I first discovered this recipe in my mom's old school red Betty Crocker cookbook.

It was one of the few cookie recipes we could find that didn't require eggs...and it turns out they are flippin delicious.

They go by multiple names: Russian tea cakes, Mexican wedding cookies, snowball cookies...they are all pretty much the same thing: sweet nutty little bites of yum!

The recipe calls for chopped nuts, and we always used whatever we had in the house...usually that wound up being walnuts. Feel free to use almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, or some combination of all of them.

Note: these are delicious cookies, not health food...swap/adapt as necessary!

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks of butter, softened
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar (plus extra for dusting)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup finely chopped nuts
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 400. In a large mixing bowl, mix the butter, sugar, and vanilla. Stir in the remaining ingredients until it's all combined and holds together and basically looks like cookie dough.

Shape the dough into ping-pong sized balls, and place on an ungreased cookie sheet, about an inch apart.

Bake for 10-12 minutes until they are set -- they should be very pale, you don't want them to brown. Let them cool slightly on a rack. While still warm (but not hot), roll them in powdered sugar, and put them back on the rack to continue cooling. If desired, you can roll them in sugar again after they've cooled.

I don't recommend throwing these snowballs...not because they'd make a mess, but because that's a terrible waste of a good cookie.

Happy snow day everyone!