Mini Chip Snowball Cookies

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! ^_^

Kentucky has finally gotten some significant snowfall, so I thought it was only appropriate to skip ahead to a recipe inspired by snowballs. This is another unusual recipe in my experience, because there are THREE sticks of butter (that is a LOT of butter!), a whole TABLESPOON of vanilla extract, NO eggs or leaveners (baking soda or baking powder), and powdered sugar instead of granulated sugar. I'm no expert pastry chef or anything, but that's unusual to me. From what I do know from Foods class in high school (for which I received college credit ;) ) and from The Food Network, I'm thinking that the reason the eggs and leaveners were left out was so that the cookies could retain a "ball" shape. Eggs and leaveners make cookies spread, so they wouldn't have looked like snowballs had those ingredients been added. And, this is just a guess, but I noticed that the powdered sugar kind of melts and becomes sticky and pasty when heated, so perhaps the powdered sugar holds the cookies together in the absence of the protein from eggs. As for the relatively large amount of vanilla... I have no idea.

Anyway~ nothing terribly eventful happened while making this recipe, which is probably for the best. It did, however, take me two hours to complete. I'm sure I could have cut down this time significantly had I put more than a dozen cookies on the baking sheet at a time, but I suppose I prefer to err on the side of caution. The recipe calls for dusting the cookies with additional powdered sugar as soon as they're out of the oven, but they didn't look terribly pretty when the sugar was absorbed into the cookies. So, as the recipe suggests, I dusted them again once they were cool and safely placed in a plastic container. As you can see, they now look like cute li'l snowballs. ^-^

This recipe, like several in the book, calls for nuts. I made the first dozen without nuts for myself, and they turned out fine. =) The recipe calls specifically for miniature semi-sweet chocolate morsels and finely chopped nuts, probably so that the cookies won't turn out lumpy or irregular looking.

If anyone out there tries this recipe, I'll give you a tip to avoid wasting powdered sugar. After sifting the sugar over the hot cookies and eventually moving the cookies to a cooling rack, use a spatula to gather up the remaining sugar to a corner of the baking sheet and carefully scrape it into a bowl. When it's time to dust the next batch, just take the sifter in one hand and the bowl of saved powdered sugar in the other and carefully pour the sugar through the sifter while moving the sifter over the cookies to coat them all. =) Any cookie crumbs or tiny, hard lumps of powdered sugar you might get won't go through the sifter, so you can toss those little bits in the trash after the rest of the sugar is sifted through.

As far as taste, they're very buttery and sugary. Of course, it's up to the person making them as to how "sugary" they taste. xP As far as texture, they're somewhat delicate, so be careful when handling the cookies. I broke a a few while moving them. I'd give this recipe... 2 1/2 out of 5 stars. Definitely interesting.

Cheers!

~Jesia