Russian Tea Cakes Recipe - Classic Christmas Snowball Cookies! (2024)

FAQs

What is the origin of snowball cookies? ›

The origin for pecan snowball cookies is unknown. Beloved in many parts of the world, these cookies may have traveled to the U.S. by way of immigrants from Eastern Europe or Mexico. Since the 20th century, they've become part of traditional American offerings for weddings and holidays, including Christmas and Easter.

Russian Tea Cake Ingredients

Flour: All-purpose flour adds structure and holds the dough together. Sugar: You'll need powdered sugar for the dough and to roll the tea cakes. Walnuts: Finely chopped walnuts add nutty flavor and welcome crunch.

Snowball cookies should not flatten. Since they do not contain a leavening agent, the main factor to check is that the dough is chilled before baking.

Some people believe that Russian Tea Cakes originated in Eastern Europe, but as far as I could tell, they inherited the name from the 19th-century American fascination with Russian tea culture.

Epicurious has two recipes for these cookies, one labeled “Russian” one labeled “Mexican” and they are exactly the same except for two things: the Russian ones have a quarter-cup of additional nuts replacing a quarter-cup of flour, and the Mexican ones suggest you add an eighth of a teaspoon of cinnamon to the powdered ...

History. Modern Christmas cookies can trace their history to recipes from Medieval Europe biscuits, when many modern ingredients such as cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, almonds and dried fruit were introduced into the west.

This black tea is smoky and smoldering. Its flavors are analogous to that of our Lapsang Souchong and it is described on our website as almost "pipe-ready". The smokiness that you taste in this tea will remind you of the deep breaths that you inhale around a summer campfire.

Outside the South, the words “tea cake” mean any cake served with tea. But to Southerners, tea cakes are more than that. They are the nostalgic cookies—crispy and golden around the edges, soft and cake-like inside—that are perfect for tea, or just about anything else you choose to drink.

samovar, metal urn, often of brass, with a spigot near its base, widely used in Russia to boil water for tea. In traditional samovars water is heated by means of a vertical tube, containing burning charcoal, running up the middle of the urn. A filled teapot is set atop the chimney to steep.

Overmixing the dough

If you overmix the dough, the cookies will be dry and crumbly. The best way to fix this is to add more liquid to the dough. This can be done by adding milk, water, or even melted butter. You may also need to add more flour to the dough if it is too wet.

How do you make cookies fluffy instead of flat? ›

Try using baking powder instead of baking soda. Baking soda encourages spreading while baking powder puffs the cookies up. If your recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, you would use 3 to 4 teaspoons of baking powder. Caution: This could result in an unwanted flavor shift.

The most common culprit behind non-spreading cookies is too much flour. This may seem counterintuitive—after all, isn't flour a key ingredient in baking? Yes, but if you add too much flour, your cookies won't spread as they bake.

Russian Cake is prepared by mixing our almond cake, gold cake and devil's food cake with raspberry jelly, rum flavor and a hint of anise oil (licorice flavor). It is then topped with buttercream and nonpareils (aka sprinkles).

History of Mexican Wedding Cookies

As Spanish colonizers brought these recipes to Mexico, they seamlessly integrated into the local culinary landscape. The cookie's association with weddings stems from its sweet symbolism of happiness, unity, and the joyful occasions surrounding matrimony.

The story goes that a New Orleans baker made it because he ran out of ingredients to bake a proper cake for the visit of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis when he visited the city in 1872 for Mardi Gras.

History. The sno-ball's history is contentious, with both New Orleans and Baltimore laying claim to the dessert. The New Orleans sno-cone history begins in the 1930s. In a pre-electric era, ice was manually scraped from a block of ice, producing a coarser, crunchier version of the sno-ball.

Another claim is that the American name derives from the Dutch word koekje or more precisely its informal, dialect variant koekie which means little cake, and arrived in American English with the Dutch settlement of New Netherland, in the early 1600s.

Also referred to as Mexican wedding cakes, these buttery cookies originated outside of Mexico. Their creation has been traced back to medieval Arab baking that predominantly featured ingredients like butter, sugar, spices and nuts.

The Great Depression Connection

In a time when many families struggled, Christmas was a bright spot. The families would ask their children to leave out milk and cookies for Santa to thank him for bringing gifts.