Santa Canela’s Fall-in-Love Wedding Cookies Recipe

Powdered sugar-coated wedding cookies, named for their appearances at marriage gatherings around the world, are a welcome addition to any celebration. They also make fantastic gifts, whether for holiday cookie boxes or a Valentine’s Day show of homemade love. Sometimes they go by other names — polvorones, pastelitas de boda — and have many sweet cousins. Italian wedding cookies, for instance, are often made with almonds. With walnuts or pecans, they might be called Russian tea cakes or snowballs. Ellen Ramos, who is the talented baker behind Highland Park’s popular Santa Canela, likes to use pecans for her Mexican wedding cookies and then she adds a pumpkin spice curveball that give her cookies a comforting finish.

You can use any pumpkin spice blend from your favorite market, but Ramos also shared the recipe to her special spice mix. In addition to cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, black pepper and ginger, she uses burnt corn husk powder (a good way to use corn husks after unwrapping tamales), which adds a subtly smoky note to the cookies. But even if you skip the corn husk powder, the pumpkin spice will make your cookies impossible to stop eating.

Watch how Ramos made the cookies when she came to the Times Test Kitchen to show us the recipe for our “Chef That!” video series.