Christmas Cookie Countdown:

Snowy Snowy Pecany Christmas Balls!

Preheat the oven to 180˚C, 160˚C Fan, 350˚F, Gas 4

With a wooden spoon or electric beaters, cream the butter with icing sugar until smooth. Add the flour and ground pecans and mix until the dough holds together. If using beaters, you don't need to incorporate a lot of air into the mixture.

Shape into 3cm balls and space apart on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes and check; the cookies should take on a lovely golden hue along the bottom edges as well as on top and may need a few more minutes. While still warm, roll in a generous amount of icing sugar.

*You can definitely play around by substituting the ground pecans with ground walnuts, almonds, or pistachios and even make crescent shapes! Best to lightly toast whole nuts first before grinding them at home but store-bought is just fine too!

**Vanilla sugar can be bought, yes absolutely! If, however you want to create something extra special, you can make this at home  by taking the seeds of 1 vanilla pod and scraping them into a whole lot of sugar, 1kg being a good start. Blitz the sugar and seeds together to a fine powder in a food processor and then taste. Leave it as it is to keep it super intense or if you want to extend your supply, add more sugar to taste (continuing to blend until you reach a fine consistency again). Return the scraped vanilla pods into the sugar to perfume your mixture even more. Never throw out your vanilla pods!