Italian Wedding Cookies are delicious little, powdered sugar-coated, butter cookie bites with almonds.

Italian Wedding Cookies are also known as Italian Butter Balls.

They are very similar to Mexican Wedding Cookies, except this recipe uses granulated sugar in the cookie dough rather than powdered sugar.

Today’s recipe is a guest post from Erica!

She shares with us today her secrets for success and shortcuts she uses and tells us how to make Italian Wedding Cookies.

Cream together butter, sugar, vanilla extract, and water all at once.

I do this all in one step because I’m usually baking these cookies last minute for different functions, and I’m trying to get things done pretty quickly.

Next, I add flour to the butter and sugar mixture. I add both cups of flour at the same time for speediness.

Once the cookie has come together, I add the almonds. I prefer to use sliced almonds, and as I am adding them to the dough, I crushed them with my hands.

I like to be able to see the nuts.

It also leaves some crunch in these otherwise soft and melt-in-your-mouth cookies.

Mix everything together one last time, and voila – you have Italian Wedding Cookie dough!

This next part is the secret to success with this cookie.

The dough must be chilled for a few hours PRIOR to baking them off.

Since I have broken my fair share of cookie scoops trying to scoop out chilled cookie dough, I form my dough balls BEFORE I refrigerate them.

I typically leave the dough in the fridge for 2 to 3 hours, but I’ve been known to leave them overnight, or even a few days (cover them up though, otherwise they will take in any other flavors/smells floating around in there).

When you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven to 325 degrees F, and place your chilled cookie dough on a baking sheet, evenly spaced.

They don’t tend to spread out, so they don’t need a ton of space in between each cookie and bake for 15-20 minutes.

The cookie tops will not brown, but the bottoms will turn a nice honey color.

In general, I bake mine for about 18 minutes, but there will be some time variations with different ovens.

Just don’t cook them until the tops of the cookie balls start to turn brown, they are overbaked by then.

Remove cookies from the baking sheet, and place them on a cooling rack.

I just recently purchased my first cooling rack, so if you don’t have one, no worries, just set them on the counter to cool.

Honestly, you could probably leave them on the baking sheet too, but I only have one, so I pull them off the cookie sheet and continue my baking adventure.

The other secret is when to roll the cookies in powdered sugar. I don’t do that when the cookies are hot or it makes a hot mess!