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.
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
- Beat the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer on high speed. The mixture should be light and fluffy when you are done.
- Stir in the vanilla and salt until well combined.
- Whisk together the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then gradually add them to the wet ingredients.
- Add the nuts and use a spatula to fold them into the dough.
- Cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes.
- Scoop and roll scant 1-tablespoon portions of dough between your palms. I recommend baking the cookies on a parchment paper lined baking sheet, but alternatively bake directly on an ungreased cookie sheet.
- Bake, then let cool for 10 minutes on the baking sheet. Transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely. It’s important that you don’t overbake these cookies, or they could become dry and crumbly instead of tender and melt in your mouth.
- Roll the cooled cookies through powdered sugar, coating liberally. Enjoy!
