Chocolate Snowballs / Eggless Snowball Cookies - Easy Christmas Cookies

Baking a perfect batch of cookies is really a challenging task for me. Most of the time i end up with burnt cookies or my experiments on cookies like egg substitute, making it vegan ended up in grand failure :( Yes so many times wasted flour, sugar, butter, coconut flakes, chocolate chips etc n my energy too in baking cookies and after that completely stopped trying it. But I wanted to share some Christmas related recipes here, Christmas cannot be completed without freshly baked goodies. So last week i tried baking the easiest cookie recipe - Snowball Cookies. Yup, really its very easy, simple recipe with basic baking ingredients and i bet any one can bake this beautiful looking snowballs :)

Long back i won Taste of Home Cookies book as a giveaway gift by Jabeen. The book has more than 600 cookies/ biscotti/ brownies/ short breads n much more recipes. I love each n every recipe in that book n wanted to try few cookies n brownies. In that row, first i picked this easy n simple chocolate snowballs from that book.

The original recipe is with egg but i don't like eggs in cookies, so searched for eggless snowballs and got it here. Both the recipes are same except the egg n extra addition of chocolate chips. So i halved the original recipe and it came out perfectly. These snowballs are melt in mouth cookies, crunchy n very delicious. Its one of the best choice of edible gifts to present your loved ones for any special occasions or festivals. Do give it a try!!!

Ingredients (yield about 4 dozen)

1. Original Recipe From the Book "Taste of Home Cookies"
2. Unsalted Butter, softened        3/4 cup 
3. Sugar                 1/2 cup
4. Egg                     1 no.
5. Vanilla Extract     2 tsp
6. All Purpose flour       2 cups
7. Salt               1/2 tsp
8. Chopped Nuts           1/2 cup( i used cashew nuts n almonds)
9. Mini Chocolate chips         1/2 cup
10. Confectioner's Sugar       1/2 cup or as needed

For Eggless Chocolate Snowballs ( yield 20 golf ball sized cookies)
I just halved the above recipe, butter = 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp

Method

• In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar.
• Add egg(for eggless version skip egg in this step) and vanilla mix everything well.

• Combine the flour and salt, stir into creamed mixture.
• Lastly fold in the nuts and chocolate chips and using hands mix everything to a stiff dough.

• Then cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1-2 hours or until firm.
• After that remove the dough from fridge, roll into 1" balls.

• Place 1" apart on baking sheets and bake it for 15-20 minutes. Mine took around 17 minutes.
• Once done remove from oven to wire racks.
• Cool cookies slightly before rolling in confectioners' sugar.

Notes:
I refrigerated the dough for 1 hour.
U can use any desired nuts like walnuts, pecans etc.
I used regular granulated sugar for cookies, but u can also use powdered sugar.
You can roll the cooled snowballs in confectioners' sugar or simply sprinkle over it.