My mother always baked her famous cherry snowballs for Christmas. I still remember how those buttery almond-scented cookies, swathed in sugar, sparkled like fresh snow. To this day, I follow the same handwritten recipe, but now I bake the snowballs with a grown-up twist. While my mother's cookies hid green and yellow maraschino cherries inside, these decidedly adult holiday cookies are stuffed with liqueur-soaked Luxardo cherries from Italy. —Elizabeth Morris, Toronto
Ingredients
- 2 cups flour
- 1 tsp. baking powder
- 1⁄4 tsp. kosher salt
- 16 tbsp. unsalted butter, softened
- 1⁄4 cup confectioners' sugar
- 1⁄2 cup almond paste
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1 egg
- 1 cup (about 30) pitted Luxardo cherries, drained
- 2 cups coarse decorating sugar
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Instructions
Step 1
Heat oven to 350°. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Using a hand mixer, beat butter and confectioners' sugar in another bowl until fluffy. Mix in almond paste, vanilla, and egg. Slowly add dry ingredients until dough forms. Roll dough into thirty 1-oz. balls. Working with 1 ball at a time, press thumb into dough and place a cherry in the center; roll dough into a ball, encasing cherry. Roll cookies in decorating sugar and place on parchment paper-lined baking sheets; bake until golden, about 20 minutes. Let cookies cool completely.
- Heat oven to 350°. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Using a hand mixer, beat butter and confectioners' sugar in another bowl until fluffy. Mix in almond paste, vanilla, and egg. Slowly add dry ingredients until dough forms. Roll dough into thirty 1-oz. balls. Working with 1 ball at a time, press thumb into dough and place a cherry in the center; roll dough into a ball, encasing cherry. Roll cookies in decorating sugar and place on parchment paper-lined baking sheets; bake until golden, about 20 minutes. Let cookies cool completely.
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