Christmas Butter Balls

December 13, 2017 |

My first new Christmas cookie recipe of the season and I picked a good one! These cookies have a festive look and a great taste! This was my first time making this recipe and I couldn’t be happier with the results. The recipe is easy to follow, the cookies are easy to form, and they bake up nicely. I’ll definitely make these again before the end of the season…and maybe even for other seasons throughout the year!

I rated this recipe 2 stars, only because of the multiple steps of rolling the dough into balls and then in sugars. Mixing the dough together was easy…and I didn’t need to make any adjustments to the recipe.

If you have kids hanging around, you might want to call them over to help with this recipe. The recipe has all the basics, so kids will learn how to measure and mix most of the normal baking ingredients. Kids will then love rolling the dough into balls and then in colored sugars. The dough is a great consistency for rolling, so kids won’t have a problem with the dough sticking to their hands. They’ll be able to form the balls easily and the colored sugar sticks to the balls quickly and evenly. Kids should be able to accomplish the all the steps with little help and hopefully little mess to clean up ?

I was really happy as I was working through this recipe! Everything came together easily. I decided to use pecans versus walnuts as I think the rich flavor of butter and pecans is great for holiday treats. I made sure to chop the nuts nice and fine, so they blended well and didn’t affect rolling the dough into balls.

After I got all my ingredients together, I started to blend the butter and sugar.

The resulting dough was a bit dry, which was perfect for rolling the dough in to small balls and then into the colored sugar. I made the balls about walnut size as the recipe says. This is a little bigger that I would normally make cookies, but I’m glad I went for the larger size. The end result cookies almost look like little ornaments for the Christmas tree!

Rolling the dough balls in the sugar went quick. Before I was done rolling, I ran out of the red and green sugar…ugh! Rather than run to the grocery store in the middle of everything, I decided to roll the last bunch of cookies in plan white granulated sugar. These cookies ended up with a nice natural cookies color and made for a nice color assortment of holiday treats looking treats!

I wasn’t sure how the balls were going to bake. Would they spread out flat like the other ball type cookies I’ve made, or would they keep their round shape. These little guys did a little of both! They stayed rounded on the top, but the bottom of the cookie flattened out.

Baking for 25 minutes seemed like a long time. I checked on them in the oven every 5 minutes to make sure they didn’t spread out too much or get too brown or burn. It was interesting to see that the size and shape of the cookies didn’t change much throughout the baking process. They grew a little bigger in size and the bottoms flattened out, but other than that, they kept their shape, color, and didn’t burn or get too done.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, this is a great recipe! Easy to mix, roll, color, and bake! The end result cookies are beautiful and festive! They have that great butter and pecan flavor and the colored sugar adds just the right amount of sweet to make these a big crowd pleaser for the kids that helped and the adults that just happen to stop by for a visit!

Enjoy!

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