One of the reasons that sharing recipes is part of my overall blog strategy is because it is an activity that I can do at home with my family. Now that the cold weather is upon us, baking and cooking are fun things that I can do with my girls. And, both of my little ones helped prepare this seasonal delight for my holiday cookie lineup.
My 13-month old is having a tough time lately. Her teeth are coming in all over the place and she just doesn’t feel like herself. The other day, she would not let me put her down. I couldn’t bear to hold her all day and she refused to play with her toys. So, I dug up my old Ergo baby carrier out of the basement to see if I could still wear her. Surprisingly, she climbed in and didn’t make a peep.
And that’s when we started on these Snowball cookies.
My 3-year old, Maddie, gets excited whenever she sees me set the butter out to soften. She knows that there is some baking coming on. This recipe for Snowball cookies is perfect for little helpers like her because they can participate in a number of steps in the process. You can see she proudly rolled some of the dough for the Snowballs.
There is a secret ingredient to all of the baking I do with my girls in the kitchen. It’s something that you can’t buy at the grocery store.
Two words: Dance. Party.
When our goods are popped in the oven, we start rocking out.
These particular Snowballs baked to an unforgettable rendition of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” sung by Alvin and The Chipmunks. And, we don’t mess around. There are twirls and jumps and lots of flailing.
And, after the dancing was over, there was more work to be done. As you can see, rolling the baked dough in powdered sugar was a very serious event.
I wish I could tell you that the clean up process after we were done was easy. But, sometimes things need to get messy to be done right. And, these were done right!
Eventually, Faye got tired of sitting in the carrier, but not before we pumped out a couple of batches of these goodies! I hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed shaking our booties while making them.
- 1 cup butter
- ½ cup confectioners' sugar (powdered sugar)
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2¼ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup finely chopped nuts (I used pecans)
- ⅓ cup confectioners' sugar (powdered sugar) for decoration
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
- Cream the butter with ½ cup of the confectioners' sugar and the vanilla.
- Mix in the flour, chopped nuts and salt. Roll about 1 tablespoon or so of dough into balls and place onto an ungreased cookie sheet. (I like my balls to be no wider in diameter than a quarter).
- Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 15 minutes.
- While cookies are still hot, roll them in confectioners' sugar. Once they have cooled roll them in confectioners' sugar once more. Rolling them twice is a must to get the desired snowball effect!