Mexican Wedding Cakes

A classic Benson family christmas cookie

These cookies have been a family favorite even before I was born. Whenever we are together for Christmas, in Sweden or in the States, we always make sure to bake Mexican Wedding Cakes. The reason why I love them is because they just melt in your mouth. They have the perfect balance of sweet and salty and by using toasted walnuts and pecans, it adds a wonderful flavor and texture to the cookies.

Ingredients

1 C butter

1/2 C confectioners sugar (florsocker)
1 tsp vanilla paste/vanilla sugar
2 C flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 C pecans and walnuts 

How to do it
Toast the nuts in the oven (make sure they don´t burn). Cream butter, sugar and vanilla until fluffy. Sift the flour and salt and add to the creame mixture, blending thoroughly. Chop the nuts and add them to the mixture. Mix well and form into 1 inch balls and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake in preheated oven (325 F/165 C). Bake 15-20 minutes, until delicately brown. Let them cool completely before rolling them in powdered sugar.

Enjoy! 

Almond butter
with a hint of pecan and walnut

























This is my new favorite thing to keep in the fridge. Almond butter. It's packed with good stuff like nutritious fats, vitamins, fiber and proteins. I can do nothing but just LOVE this thick, sticky, slightly crunchy nutty butter. As for me, making home made almond butter from scratch instead of buying it in the store is simply the best! 


Whipping up the almond butter is an easy task, but if you don't have a really good blender it might take you some time to get the alomnds ground up and eventually into a paste. It took me almost a whole day to get the almond butter just the right consistency that I wanted (also because I had the worst stick blender to work with). 


Igredients
2 cups of almonds
1/2 cup of pecans
1/2 cup of walnuts
1 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla sugar
a couple pinches of sea salt


How to do it:
Start off by toasting the nuts in the oven. It's a good idea to keep an eye on them while they're in the oven, if they are left in too long and roast too much the toasty flavor gets overpowering. After they've cooled down and gotten dry it's time to start grinding them up. I used a blender. Don't do all the nuts at the same time, it can get tough for the blender to mix it all. What's great about making almond butter is that you don't just have to stick to almonds. Dumping in some pecan, walnuts, macadamia or why not sunflower seeds is a prefect way to give the butter a different but subtle dimension in flavor and consistency. I love how this almond butter turned out, with a hint of the pecans and walnuts in the background. Adding vanilla sugar also gives the almond butter a round and cozy flavor that goes perfectly well in combination with the different nuts.