Mom's Christmas Cookies .... of Death



After digging out from under the 10" of snow we got over the weekend, Brian and I decided to do some Christmas baking. He made his family's traditional lebkuchen (ie. cookies of life), while I made my family's traditional Snowball cookies (ie. cookies of death.)

To make the death cookies:

1/2 cup unsalted butter (1 stick)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 cup sifted flour
pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup finely chopped pecans
powdered sugar (confectioner's sugar)

Preheat oven to 325 ˚F. Cream butter and sugar. Add flour and salt & combine. Add pecans and vanilla. Gather dough into a ball in the bottom of the mixing bowl, cover with plastic wrap and chill for at least 1 hour along with 1 large baking sheet. After 1 hour, shape dough into small, quarter sized balls and place on chilled baking sheet. Bake ~12 mins or until lightly brown. Immediately (and carefully) roll in powdered sugar and allow to cool. Once cooled, roll in powdered sugar again. Makes ~20 snowballs.

Notes:
1) This is a simple shortbread recipe, you could change it nearly anyway you wanted with additions or substitutions. You could, for example, add cinnamon, or chocolate, change the nuts, eliminate the nuts, etc., etc., etc., You could even bake them flat, without the powdered sugar to make your own "Pecan Sandies" (though I'd up the sugar content in the cookie, this recipe relies on the fact that you're coating the outside in sugar to give the cookie more sweetness.)
2) If the butter is too soft, the cookies will spread as they cook, thus it's best to use chilled butter and keep the dough and the baking sheet chilled right until baking.
3) I assume everyone knows this hint already, but just in case... If you, like me, find that getting out the food processor to chop a 1/2 cup of nuts, and then having to clean the damn thing up is just too much work, and yet your knife skills aren't good enough to chop them on a cutting board without them shooting across the kitchen (fun for kitties!), then just put the shelled whole nuts in a ziplock freezer bag, seal it, and ... uh ... chop your nuts right in the bag.
4) The hot cookies are very fragile and will easily crumble into cookie dust until they cool and set.

and most importantly:

5) Under no circumstances should you ever inhale while eating one of these cookies. Because of their diminutive size, people are prone to pop a whole one in their mouth while inhaling. Then they choke on the massive cloud of powdered sugar. Thus, they're called "cookies of death." Make this Christmas a happy one, and don't choke on a Christmas cookie. Not only would that be a rather ignominious end, it would seriously bum everyone else out.

Posted: Tue - December 18, 2007 at 11:38 AM        

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