Sweet & Simple Snowball Cookies
Snowball cookies are classic, old-fashioned cookies that are popular during the Christmas season. They’re similar to Russian tea cakes or Mexican wedding cookies, but we will be chilling the dough and using more cornstarch and flour here for round, snowball-like cookies!
What you’ll love about them:
Melt in your mouth, extremely tender texture. An eggless cookie recipe! Not too sweet; most of the sweetness comes from the powdered sugar on the outside. Just 30 minutes of chilling!
I also include instructions for making chocolate chip snowball cookies, just in case you’d prefer to make those instead. Regardless of their add-ins, these cookies are so festive and wintery with their pretty powdered sugar exteriors ❄️ This recipe is so simple to make with just seven ingredients. Let’s go over them briefly before we get started!
What You Need
In recipes like this where we are using just a few ingredients, quality makes a big difference (especially with the butter!). Here are the most important ingredients we’ll be using today.
Butter. I know it’s a splurge, but European butter will make your cookies taste even better than regular butter. I stick with unsalted butter and add salt myself, but you can use salted butter and skip the additional salt in the recipe. Powdered sugar. Also known as icing sugar or confectioner’s sugar, this is a key ingredient in snowball cookies. We’ll use it to sweeten the dough and encourage a tender texture, since powdered sugar also contains cornstarch. It’s important here for much of the same reason it’s an essential ingredient in my shortbread cookie recipe. We’ll also roll our cooled cookies in powdered sugar, giving them that classic snowball look! Cornstarch. Snowball cookies melt in your mouth, just like snow. This lovely texture comes from cornstarch, one of my favorite cookie ingredients. It adds tenderness and helps the cookies keep their round shape too. Nuts. You can use either pecans or walnuts. It’s very important to finely chop the nuts! If the nuts aren’t small enough, the cookies will fall apart when you bite into them.
SAM’S TIP: If you can’t chop your nuts fine enough with a knife, place them in the food processor and briefly pulse until chopped. Don’t go too far though, or you could end up with nut butter. Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!
How to Make Snowball Cookies
SAM’S TIP: Make sure to coat your cookies entirely in sugar so they look like actual snowballs (and so they taste right!). Let the cookies cool completely (otherwise the sugar melts on the cookie) then roll through sugar. Still not totally coated? Roll again! You can also sift sugar over the cookies after rolling. Which do you prefer, snowball cookies with nuts or chocolate chips? Enjoy! Let’s bake together! Subscribe to my newsletter to be notified of all the newest recipes, and find all of my free recipe tutorials on YouTube 💜
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