Today is White Day in Japan, a day to re-imburse those who gave gifts on Valentine's Day. Traditionally in Japan, mostly women gave chocolates to men on Valentine's Day, and men returned the favour by giving something sweet and or white on White Day. I've talked about it before.

While I've sometimes made marshmallows for White Day, this year I decided to try something different.

Somewhere I'd recently seen a picture of children making some giant baseball-sized cookies that were round and white, and this became my inspiration. Once I had some free time and started searching for the picture and recipe, none could be found. Further searching led me to Snowball cookies, or Russian Tea Cakes (there seems to be a wide variety of names for the same cookie).

I found a variety of recipes and took some ideas from this one, and some from that one to hobble together a recipe. There was no big changes made other than making a half-sized version of most recipes. I also used almonds, seeing as that was what we had at home.

The end result is a cookie that is really yummy! There is a good crunch to the cookie, but it is still a bit tender in the centre. The sugar coating is sweet, but it is balanced by the pinch of salt I added (some recipes don't add it) and the nuttiness of the almonds (those crazy nuts).

I'm giving some of these cookies to 2 young students who kindly gave me some sweets for Valentine's. The rest of the cookies are for the good boy who baked them!!