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<\/a><\/div>\nAnd it\u2019s the holidays! Right! A couple of weeks ago, during a reprieve between viruses, my mother, June, and I managed to bake a double batch of Russian Tea Cakes, a cookie that my mother used to make every year when I was a kid, back when she and our family friend Barbara Fretwell would hole up together in the weeks before Christmas and churn out eight or ten kinds of cookies and candies to pack in decorative tins and distribute to lucky friends around town.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/div>\nI\u2019ve written before about some of the recipes that my mother and Barbara used, like Chocolate Rads<\/a>, Espresso-Walnut Toffee<\/a>, and Fruit-Nut Balls<\/a>. There were also cranberry-pistachio biscotti, and chocolate-dipped pecan bars with shortbread crust, and a cookie called an Apricot Crescent, with cream cheese-enriched dough and apricot jam inside. They even made mendiants<\/i><\/a>. Opening one of their tins was like looking inside my mother\u2019s jewelry box, rows and piles of color and shine. Maybe next year, I\u2019ll tell you about their Linzer Cookies, the best Linzer specimen I\u2019ve had. But they\u2019re fiddly, and though Mom and I did manage to make some last week, I didn\u2019t take pictures and instead wound up taking a nap. Russian Tea Cakes are easier, even if you\u2019re short on time, energy, and\/or holiday spirit, and they\u2019re something that even a two-year-old could help with, sort of, if she doesn\u2019t eat all the dough first.<\/p>\n I imagine you\u2019ve heard of Russian Tea Cakes. They also go by the name Mexican Wedding Cookies, and probably some other names, too. Sometimes, to be frank, when I run across them out in the world, I don\u2019t think Russian Tea Cakes are all that great. Some taste mostly of sugar, or worse, of flour. This makes me cranky. A Russian Tea Cake should be rich, tender, melting almost instantly when you bite into it. As holiday cookie recipes go, this one is plain, bare-bones: just six ingredients, a mixer, maybe 15 minutes to mix up the dough, maybe 15 minutes to roll the cookies, maybe 10 minutes to roll them in powdered sugar. But the return on investment is impressive: these things are so delicate, so buttery, so nutty, that people get grabby in their presence. They\u2019re nothing new, no, but there\u2019s a good reason why we still make them.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div>\n