Snowball Cookies

1. 01 Introduction: Welcome to this class. In this class, we will be making these snowball cookies, or the other name is Mexican Wedding Cookies. First, I will teach you how to make the cookie dough. Next, I will teach you how to prepare the cookies for baking. Then I will teach you how to bake and cool the cookies. Finally, I will teach you how to roll them in powdered sugar. I am a self taught baker. Many years ago I decided I wanted to open up my own home business. But I didn't feel like my cake decorating skills were at the same level as my baking skills. So I took some classes, watch some videos, read some books, and of course, did a lot of practice until I felt like my cake decorating skills were at the level that I could open up my own home business and make cakes for people, for special occasions. Part of this business was to also make desserts like these for parties, farmers markets, and festivals. I had this business for several years until my husband got a job offer across the country in another city. We felt like this was a good move for us, and so I closed my business and we moved across the country. Now here I do not want to open up another home business, but I still love making. And as a retired teacher, I love teaching. So I have decided to share my skills with you on Skill share this aimed at the baker that would like to learn how to make a delicious drop cookie that is then rolled into sugar. I am excited to teach you the skills in this class. Let's move on to lesson number one, making the cookie dough. 2. 02 Cookie Dough: We are ready to start making the cookie dough for our Mexican wedding cookies, or snowball cookies. These are the traditional version with nothing extra added in this bowl. I'm going to put my softened butter and I'm going to cream it. Tell this life. You'll notice I broke the butter up first so that it would cream faster. You can see that's pretty light, except we have this chunk here that I'm not sure is light. I'm going to bring that down and mix that one in there. We have our nice, lightly mixed creamed butter. Now we're going to add the rest of the ingredients, starting with our two tablespoons of sugar. There's one, there's two, our one teaspoon of vanilla, our 34 cup of pecans that are chopped. 01 cup of flour and 14 teaspoon of salt. We do not add the powdered sugar. The cookies are going to be rolled in that after they're baked, I'm going to just put this on a low stew pasta and slowly try to mix all dry into there we have the dough for the cookies. 3. 03 Forming the Cookies: We're ready to put the cookies onto the cookie sheet, and then we'll be ready to bake the cookies. I do have the oven preheating to 350 degrees, so that when we're done putting the cookies on the cookie sheet, we can bake them. Here is our cookie sheet. We want to cover it with parchment paper, and then I'm going to use this little ice cream scoop. If you don't have one, you can just use a spoon. We want to make about 1 " balls. Just put it on the cookie sheet. We're just going to keep doing this until we have our cookie sheet filled, because these are not very big, they're only about 1 " balls. You can actually fit quite a few on a cookie sheet. I'm going to spread these over just a little bit, so I can put one row there, and there we have 123456, and then we can easily get at least six rows there. You go ahead and scoop your cookie dough out, and I'll finish mine and then we'll be back to bake. I have my cookie sheet filled with the cookie dough. This batch made 28 cookies for me. In our next lesson, I will show you how to bake and cool the cookies. 4. 04 Baking and Cooling: We are ready to bake the cookies. The oven has preheated and we have the rack in the middle. Let's go over and show you how we do this. As you can see, the rack is in the middle. We're just going to take our cookies, place them in the oven, and we're going to set the timer for 15 minutes. We'll be back in 15 minutes when the timer goes off to see how our cookies look. Our timer is now going off. We're going to check our cookies and see if they're done. We don't want them really brown, just browning on the edges. Let me just tilt this so you can see. As you can see, that is just the way we want it. We're now going to let the cookies cool for just a couple of minutes. We don't want them completely cool because in our next lesson, we're going to show you what we do to them with the powdered sugar before they completely cool. And they do need to still be warm, so the powdered sugar will stick. So we'll be back with our next lesson in a couple of minutes, once these have cooled. 5. 05 Finishing Touches: Our cookies have cooled for a couple of minutes there you can see the cookies. Here's our cooling rack with our powdered sugar. Let's show you what we're going to do. We're going to take the cookie and just roll it in the powdered sugar, and then place it on the cooling rack to finish cooling. You can actually stick more than one in there at a time. These are still very warm, but we let them cool just enough that we could handle them without burning our fingers. So I'm going to continue to roll my cookies. You continue to roll your cookies. And then we'll be done with our cookies. And there we have finished dipping all the cookies. Now we're going to let these completely cool till they're room temperature, and then we'll be ready to serve them. 6. 06 Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking this class. We had fun making our Mexican wedding cookies, or our snowball cookies. We first learned how to make the cookie dough. Then I showed you how to scoop them and place them on a cookie sheet. We then bake them and let them cool just a little bit before rolling them in powdered sugar, and then putting them on the cooling rack to rest The I hope your cookies turned out the way you wanted it to. The recipe for these cookies is in our project section. Your project for this is to make these cookies. Please take a picture and post it on our project page so everyone can see you. Great work. Also let us know how it went from my kitchen to your kitchen. Happy baking.