Walnut Snowballs

Ever on the search for delicious things to do with walnuts (since I have several young walnut trees in the orchard) I was delighted to find a recipe for some slightly quirky walnut based biscuits on Simply Recipes. Right on cue, as I made these back in January, it began to hail enough to dust the ground in white and to our east and north they had proper snow.

Ingredients
1 cup flour
1.5 cups walnuts, finely chopped
3 tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract (I actually forgot to add this, and the biscuits didn't suffer)
125 g butter, cut into dice
A pinch of salt
About 5 generous tablespoons of icing sugar

Method

1. Shell and chop the walnuts if you are using homegrown.
2. Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, walnuts, sugar) together.
3. Add the vanilla.
4. Rub the butter in to the dry mix until it looks like coarse breadcrumbs. This will take a while because of the nuts.
5. Chill the dough for at least 30 minutes.
6. Heat the oven to 150C and line baking trays with silicone mats.
7. Form the dough into large marble sized balls and place on the trays. They won't spread but leave a gap of a couple of centimetres.
8. Bake for 35 minutes.
9. Once out of the oven cool for 5-10 minutes then roll in icing sugar.
10. Put on a rack to cool completely then roll them in icing sugar a second time.
11. Makes about 18 balls. They keep well in a sealed jar, and will freeze.

I buy my flour from Farine du Berry, butter from the Laiterie de Verneuil, both available in the Intermarché supermarket in Yzeures sur Creuse. The vanilla comes from a guy I see every year at the Saffron Fair in Preuilly who has a mate in Réunion with a vanilla plantation.

Yum

************************************************

For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.