Mexican Wedding Cakes Recipe

These shortbread-like nut balls are mysteriously referred to both as Russian Tea Cookies and Mexican Wedding Cakes — for Phoebe’s Top Chef Cook-Off, I stuck with the theme of the latter. Typically, you make them with very little sugar in the dough; they’re sweetened instead by rolling them through a mountain of powdered sugar after baking. But because I wasn’t in the mood to dust powdered sugar from every corner of my kitchen, I opted to mix the sugar into the dough. They stay crisp this way, too — whereas sugar on the outside can become soggy.