Swedish Snowballs recipe
“Cookie Day” is one of the most joyful, but exhausting, days of my holiday season. One Saturday in early December I gather with my four sisters, my childhood best friend and her mother at my mom’s house. The rules are as follows: bring one dough already made, the ingredients for a second cookie, cookie sheets, cooling racks and your own tins or Tupperware. What follows is a marathon of mixing, baking, decorating, last minute trips to the grocery store and mountains of dirty dishes.
We each leave with a dozen varieties of Christmas cookies — plus, chocolate chip for my Dad, a ploy to keep him out of the other cookies. This abundance of cookies has traditionally provided gift platters for teachers, neighbors and family friends. Now that I have a husband and three teenagers of my own, I am lucky if the cookies survive to offer guests through the 25th.
My ‘“signature bake,” if this were “The Great British Baking Show,” is the Swedish Snowball (or Chokladbollar). Part of its allure is that it isn’t a “bake” at all. It is the simplest of refrigerator cookies, which leaves me out of the daylong battle for the one oven. My Mom got the recipe from a Swedish work colleague in the early ‘70s. I have always loved the grown-up and not-overly-sweet combination of strong coffee, unsweetened cocoa, butter, oatmeal and brown sugar. You can roll them in regular granulated sugar at the end, but pearl sugar adds to the snowball effect.
— Kirsten Finn, executive director of Wisconsin Bike Fed
Swedish Snowballs
Recipe tested by Zeina Makky
Makes about 20
- ½ cup (1 stick) butter, room temperature
- ½ cup packed brown sugar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 1 ⅓ cups old-fashioned rolled oats
- 2 tablespoons strong coffee, cooled
- ⅓ cup pearl sugar, granulated sugar or coconut flakes for decorating
In bowl beat together butter, brown sugar and vanilla until fluffy. Mix in cocoa powder. Add oats and coffee and mix well.
Shape mixture into small balls, about half the size of a golf ball. Roll in pearl sugar, granulated sugar or coconut flakes.
Store in an airtight container and chill in refrigerator until serving.