In the Cookie Kitchen: Bake your own Snowballs!

OK, so where is the snow, people? It's December! Christmas is mere weeks away and I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of rain and mud up to my eyeballs! So to help get my Christmas spirit going and spread some holiday cheer, Sissy and I baked up our own batch of snowballs!

This recipe is right from Gooseberry Patch's Jolly Holidays cookbook...but I won't show you my personal copy...it's a little worse for the wear appearance-wise after riding out a house fire in 2003....but that's another story for another day...

The recipe is pretty simple. Here's what you will need:

• 3/4 cup butter, softened
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup pecans (my kids don't eat nuts, so we substituted this for 1 cup white chocolate chips and swirled chocolate chips)
• 1 cup chocolate chips
• powdered sugar

 We made a double batch so we could share with our neighbor who just broke her arm. She's a dairy farmer super active in her family operation, so being laid up and "one-armed" through the holidays is especially hard! Plus, this made fabulous practice for Sissy in adding fractions, too.

Just cream the butter and sugar then add the egg and vanilla. Blend in the flour, then fold in the nuts and chips—or in our case, lots and lots of chips. Roll the dough into walnut-sized balls and place on an ungreased cookie sheet according to the recipe. We found the dough to be kind of sticky for this, so we gave them an advanced coating of powdered sugar to aid in the ball-making.

Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes, then roll in powdered sugar again to coat well. I thought this would be a good jobs for Sissy, but to be honest she was kind of skimpy on the powdered sugar - which surprised me. Store in an air-tight container. Makes 3-3.5 dozen cookies. I don't think my double batch made nearly this many, but we may have made ours too large.

Here they are all ready to deliver:

I tucked in 3 packets of white chocolate pear-flavored cider mix with the cookies, too, so the entire family could take a break and enjoy our special delivery...

Available exclusively from Dove Chocolate Discoveries and super yummy! Click for details!

And here are my munchkins ready to make their delivery:

 Of course, this was right after I threatened them before heading over to the neighbors to be on their best behavior while I helped her write out her monthly bills.

Enjoy!