My favorite recipes are the kinds that you can tweak. This recipe for Mexican Wedding Cakes is perfect for this. If you like pecans, you can add more. If you don’t like vanilla, you can add less. I like mine a little more flour-y and salty, so I add a touch more salt, and fewer pecans. Have a nut allergy? Skip the pecans altogether. It’s just as tasty!

A dozen different cultures have a version of this cookie. The basic ingredients never change: butter, confectioner’s sugar, salt, vanilla and nuts. Mexican Wedding Cakes and Spanish Wedding Cookies have pecans in them. Russian Tea Cakes have walnuts. The Girl Scouts also had a lemony version of this cookie. I even saw them this week on EAD: Weddings. Jasmine Star’s sister, Bianca, included them in her dessert buffet.

You can use salted butter if that’s all you have on hand but don’t add the extra salt. Make sure your butter is at room temperature and is really soft without being melted, otherwise the dry ingredients won’t truly mix with it. Bake one pan at a time. These will burn easily, so watch carefully. I like to divide the dough before adding the nuts, and make half of the batch without pecans. For lemon cookies, switch the vanilla with lemon extract and don’t add pecans.

Once you make them, you’ll never go back to store bought. They just don’t compare.

Mexican Wedding Cakes

1 cup softened unsalted butter
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups flour
slightly less than 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup pecans, toasted and finely ground

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Cream butter and vanilla together. Mix the salt, flour and confectioners’ sugar separately and then stir into the creamed butter until well blended. Mix in pecan. Dough will be crumbly. Grab enough to make a 1″ ball. Roll dough in hands (the butter will warm as you roll and smooth out the crumbles). Arrange 1.5 to 2″ apart on cookie sheet. Bake for 12-15 minutes until lightly browned. Remove from oven. Let sit for a few minutes, and then place on baking sheet. When cool, roll each cookie in confectioners’ sugar.

Yield: 3 dozen