Jan's Crescent Cookies

Crescent cookies go by a dozen names depending on whose grandmother taught the recipe. Mexican wedding cookies, Russian tea cakes, kifli, snowballs, polvorones. The shape changes, the spice changes, but the soul of the cookie is the same: butter, flour, nuts, and a generous dusting of powdered sugar that turns the whole tray snow-white when warm.

This version leans cinnamon, with a 3:1 powdered sugar to cinnamon coating that wraps each cooled cookie in a sweet-spiced shell. The cinnamon makes them feel right at home on a Christmas cookie tray, but they’re just as good with coffee any time of year.

There are no eggs, no leavener, no liquid. The structure comes entirely from butter creamed with sugar until it lightens, then flour and nuts folded in to form a stiff but workable dough. Rolling them in coating while they’re still warm is the move that gets the sugar to actually stick. Cold cookies shed the dust.

Pecans or walnuts are the traditional choices and either works beautifully. The recipe just calls for nuts, so use what you have.

Pro Tips

• Cream the butter and sugar properly until truly pale and fluffy. With no leavener, that incorporated air is the only lift the cookies get.
• Toast the chopped nuts before adding for deeper flavor. Raw nuts disappear into the dough; toasted nuts hold their character.
• Form the crescents thin in the middle and tapered at the ends. Thick centers stay underbaked while the tips burn.
• Roll cookies in the sugar mixture twice if you want a heavier coating: once warm, once after they fully cool.

Variations

• Skip the cinnamon for plain powdered sugar coating to make true Russian tea cakes or Mexican wedding cookies.
• Use almonds, hazelnuts, or pistachios in place of the standard pecans/walnuts.
• Add a half teaspoon of vanilla extract or a teaspoon of dark rum to the dough for extra warmth.