Cookie time

Ok, I've been looking a lot at cooking with tea recently (combining my two passions, food and tea omg). I listened to a really excellent podcast the other day interviewing Robert Wemischner (the author of Cooking with tea) and he really inspired me.

So here we go, a little cooking experiment.

I made two batches of cookies. One with earl grey tea, and the other with a toffee tea I just bought (which smells DIVINE - can't wait to drink it). Still working on the recipe, but bear with me, they taste pretty good.

First off, you want to infuse the butter with tea. A lot of recipes for tea cookies suggest you crush tea and put it in to the cookies - but seriously, who wants to eat bits of tea leaf?

Infusing butter with tea

1. You will need two grams of tea per tablespoon of butter.
2. Melt the butter in a small saucepan until just melted
3. Add the tea leaves and simmer for about 5 minutes
4. Turn the heat off and leave the tea to steap. The longer the better I think
5. Now you have delicious smelling, tasty butter. I'm not sure if you can put it in the fridge and reuse it. I think it is best to use straight away.

Note that is it is best to use a really strong tea for this. Delicate flavours get lost in the butter.

Ok, now you have amazing butter infused with whatever flavour you want. You'll need about 250 g for the following recipe, so I'd say you'd need about 20g of tea.

Earl Grey Cookies with Orange, Toffee Tea Cookies

The basic cookie recipe is thus. You can use whatever flavour of tea you want, just remember they won't come out super strong.

Ingredients
150g icing sugar
250g tea infused butter
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 egg, lightly whisked
375g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder


Method

1. Cream icing sugar and tea infused butter in a bowl until light and creamy
2. add vanilla essence (if making earl grey cookies, add the zest of an orange here) and keep beating
3. add the egg and mix until everything is combined and glossy
4. sift flour and baking powder into the bowl, and gently combine with wet ingredients
5. turn dough onto a lightly floured surface, and roll in to a tube. Cover with cling wrap and set in the fridge for about an hour
6. cut into rounds about 2cm thick and place on a baking tray. Sprinkle with raw sugar if desired (it adds a nice crunch)
7. Bake at 180 degrees celcius for 10 minutes, or until golden brown.

Alright, there we go! I slightly overcooked mine so they were on the crunchy side, but still damn tasty (especially the toffee tea ones).