Two Peas & Their Pod Bakes Mexican Wedding Cookies

Portable, fun to make, easy to gift, and open to countless flavor variations, cookies are everyone's favorite sweet treat. In the test kitchen's first all-cookie book, The Perfect Cookie, we've created a one-stop shop for every cookie recipe you could want, from Coffee Toffee Cookies to Vanilla Bean-Apricot Sandwich Cookies, Baci di Dama to White Chocolate Raspberry Bars. Each of the 250 recipes are kitchen-tested to not only work, but to exceed expectations every time. And with almost 25 years of experience baking cookies and bars of all kinds, we've also provided all the tips and tricks for executing perfect cookies every time.

What do you call these cookies? We call them Mexican wedding cookies, but they are also known as Russian tea cakes (or even snowballs, making for the perfect snow day treat). They have a delicate, fine, melt-in-your-mouth texture. We’re following the lead of Maria of Two Peas & Their Pod blog and making these cookies the next time we need something to satisfy our sweet tooth.

During recipe development we determined that grinding half of the nuts very finely into crumbs to release their natural oil helped the dough hold together. As a result the cookie dough was cohesive, the texture was delicate and each bite still included the pleasing crunch of the coarsely chopped nuts. Finally, two rolls in powdered sugar ensure a thorough coating.

“The cookies are buttery, crisp, and they melt in your mouth!”

For the nuts, Maria put her own spin on them. Instead of the traditional pecans or walnuts, she used her recipe for candied pecans. Needless to say, it was a genius idea. Between our recipe and her nutty twist, she can confidently proclaim these to be the best version of this cookies she's ever had—no matter what you call them. 

After tasting them for the first time, she gushed: "I am telling you these Mexican Wedding Cookies are hands down the BEST Mexican Wedding Cookies in the history of all Mexican Wedding Cookies, snowballs, Russian tea cakes, pecan balls, sand tarts, and southern pecan balls. . . whatever you want to call them, they are the BEST!"

What’s your favorite cookie? Let us know in the comments! For the recipe for Mexican Wedding Cookies, read Maria’s post.