Tea is our ingredient of the season this winter. We’re using that as an excuse to sit down more often and relax over a cuppa’. Check out the entire tea archive and all our Valentine DIYs here.
Hey sweethearts! We’re baking with tea today. You can enjoy these earl grey tea cookies alone or with ice cream as a sandwich – that’s the route we’re taking. The toasted tea adds a warm, sweet flavor to the buttery cookies. They’re so simple you don’t even need a mixer.
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 2 tablespoons earl grey tea leaves (about 4 tea bags)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/4 cup flour
- 1/4 cup powdered sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons milk
- 1/4 cup* unsalted butter
- 1/4 cup* vegetable shortening
- *or 1/2 cup of either one.
Instructions
- Put the tea leaves in a small saucepan over medium heat for 1-2 minutes. After a minute, shake the tea leaves around a bit and see if you can smell them toasting. If so, remove from heat, if not, heat for thirty more seconds.
- Combine the 1/4 cup of sugar,toasted tea leaves and vanilla extract in a large bowl. Mix well with a fork, really incorporate the sugar granules with the tea and vanilla.
- Next add the flour, powdered sugar, and salt.
- Last, add the milk, softened butter and vegetable shortening.
- Stir everything together with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula until it's all one big lump.
- Transfer the cookie dough onto a large piece of wax paper and using the wax paper manipulate the shape of the dough into a log shape. Fold the wax paper over the dough log and flatten the dough out with your palms or a rolling pin. Rolling it out this way keeps all the dough inside the wax paper and it helps the dough to stay together. I kept my cookies quite thick - about 1/4 of an inch.
- Use a cookie cutter (or simply a knife) and cut out your cookies. Re-rolling and cutting again if necessary.
- Place the cookies 1-2 inches apart on a cookie sheet lined with wax paper.
- Chill the cookies for 30 minutes in the freezer.
- Preheat the oven to 350° and bake for 12 minutes or when edges start to brown slightly.
- Let the cookies cool completely then add ice cream and re-freeze or enjoy immediately!
I was going for extreme indulgence here. I used Ben & Jerry’s vanilla ice cream and I mixed in an entire roll of Girl Scout thin mint cookies. I let the ice cream soften a little bit, crushed the cookies in a plastic baggie, and then mixed the two together in a large glass baking dish. I then smoothed out the ice cream into a 1/2 inch thick sheet and placed in back in the freezer. When the cookies were done, I used the heart cookie cutter to trace and cut the ice cream resulting in a tailored treat 🙂 Of course, this step is extraneous, you could just scoop out readymade ice cream onto your cookies.
I became so hungry while making these earl grey cookie ice cream sandwiches that I had to create a mini version to tide me over while i photographed the bigger guys!
HOLY CUTENESS!!!