Recipes

[house_cat]

I don't have experience with your recipe, but in my experience with similar cookies, I think it has to do with how you cream the butter and sugar.  If the butter is room temp, not melted, it will cream well with the sugar and become light and fluffy. If you melt the butter you will get very different results.

[deepwaterdotter]

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@house_cat wrote:

I don't have experience with your recipe, but in my experience with similar cookies, I think it has to do with how you cream the butter and sugar.  If the butter is room temp, not melted, it will cream well with the sugar and become light and fluffy. If you melt the butter you will get very different results.

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Good advice.

[aroc3435]

@amyb   If doing more than one sheet I let it cool completely.  I let them cool off and then put the sheets in between using in the fridge or freezer for a few minutes to "stop the spread" from occurring for this type of cookie aand I do chill my dough in the fridge as well.

Happy baking!  And as long as they taste good that's the most important part.

aroc3435

Washington, DC

[gardenman]

I've made snowballs for decades, and they always have flat bottoms. I've never seen a snowball cookie that was perfectly round. They're almost entirely butter and sugar and when you heat butter it spreads. I suppose you could bake them in a round mold form, but if you're cooking them on a cookie sheet using a "normal" snowball recipe, they'll have a flat bottom simply due to the high butter content. If you really want a round cookie, simply take two domed cookies, add a bit of frosting to the flat surfaces, squish them together, and roll the ball in powdered sugar. Shazam! You've got a round snowball! (I just did a Google image search, and all of the snowball cookie photos I found have flat bottoms. The only ones that appear to be perfectly round are those shot looking straight down where you can't see the bottoms.)

[amyb]

@gardenman After reading your comment, I too Googled some pics~and actually, you are correct...THIS below is how I recall them on every cookie tray I've seen. In my mind I guess I pictured them like balls. Mine didn't look this round, and that's I guess what threw me...mine are bigger, flatter, just like a typical cookie, not a "snowball."

I think I used too much dough, next time less so maybe they come smaller, rounder. And though I could keep them more chilled from the fridge, and that too might keep them from spreading (I agree with other commenter, they ARE mostly butter and I can see that that would melt down), anyway, only some recipes actually told you to chill the dough so not sure that was it anyway.

Thanks everyone. I realize it's not a big deal at all...especially now that I realize all of them are a little flat on the bottom, I had just always thought they were little balls. Who knows, maybe next time with a little less dough, and chilled I'll get them like this below. All that said...they did come delicious!

[gardenman]

@amyb 

Yeah, with that much butter, there's no way, other than by using a round mold to bake them in, that you'll get a perfectly round cookie. There are oven safe, half round silicone baking molds that could be used to get a perfectly round (or nearly so) cookie, but if you're baking them on a cookie sheet, you'll get a flat bottom. (Having said that I'm now tempted to get a half round silicone baking sheet to try for my snowballs next year. Amazon sells a trio if them from Bakers Depot in a small, medium and large half dome size for $12.60. Hmmm...) 

[gardenman]

I'm just dusting off this thread because those crazy people at Amazon recently informed me that the silicone molds I'd looked up way back in December were on sale. I'm not very good at resisting sales, so I bought them. I made a batch of Snowball cookies today to test out the molds. I'm very happy to report I can now make snowball cookies that are perfectly round on the bottom! Not so much not the top, but perfectly round on the bottom.

The molds come in small, medium, and large sizes. The small and medium make very nice one-bite size cookies. The large makes a  more generous snowball but is trickier to get cooked all the way through. Here's a photo of the medium-sized ones before they got rolled in the powdered sugar.

These were in the medium-sized mold and needed just a tick more dough to get them a bit rounder on top. These were about 14-16 grams of raw dough and I think 18-20 grams of dough would be perfect. I made a second batch of them using 22-24 grams and they developed 'ledging' where the dough expanded over the edge of the mold making them less than perfectly round. They were more like the planet Saturn with a ring around them.

The little ones are about perfect with six grams of raw dough. They really are a one-gulp cookie at that size, but very tasty. The medium-sized ones are also a one mouthful cookie. I used 42 grams of dough in the large mold and that wasn't nearly enough. Probably 60 grams of dough would be better if I use that mold again. I may stick with just the small and medium though.

The cooking times varied with the size of the mold with the smallest ones being done a minute quicker than normal. (About seven minutes.) The medium ones were cooked in just about the normal 8-10 minutes. I gave the large ones 12-13 minutes and they were still not fully cooked in the middle but looked done on the outside. I might need a lower temp and a longer cooking time for the bigger mold if I use that again.

If you want perfectly round snowball cookies then the silicone molds are the way to go. At least to get perfectly round bottoms. The molds worked great. No sticking though with that much butter in a recipe it's hard for anything to stick. There was no risk of the bottoms burning. (Always an issue with snowball cookies.) The cookies popped out of the molds with no trouble. The molds look the same before and after baking. They'll get washed, but they may not even need it. All in all, it was a good experiment and I get to eat the results.