World to Table

I tasted my first tea cookie when my friend Tiffany started working at Amai Tea House (which is sadly now closed).  Amai’s tea cookies combined two of my favorite things—tea and cookies—so naturally they rank pretty high on my list of favorite edible things.  Having tried some of TWG‘s teas at a tea tasting at Dean & Deluca, I convinced TWG to supply some tea to serve at my launch party.  I decided I wanted to do more than simply serve tea as a drink.  So, not only did I serve the teas iced, I decided to make tea cookies to accompany the iced tea, for a mind-blowing total tea experience.

Inspired by the Amai Tea House tea cookie recipe, this would be a nice variation on the buttery confections traditionally served for British high tea. I used TWG’s Napoleon black tea and Geisha Blossom green tea.  The black tea cookies were a success, they had a bold tea flavor and the vanilla undertones of the Napoleon tea worked well in buttery cookie form.  I confess I messed up the green tea cookies.  I was a little too generous with the butter when making the green tea cookie dough, resulting in a big amoebic lump of unwieldy green tea cookie mush, which stubbornly refused to solidify into a proper dough consistency.  So, you will have to trust me on this, the black tea cookies taste better than the green tea cookies.  Aside from the butter catastrophe, I have used this recipe to make green tea cookies before, but they somehow always end up with a strange grassy taste.  If you choose to venture into green tea territory, opt for a powdery matcha green tea instead of the loose green tea.

This is a derivation from a Lovescool / Amai Tea House recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar
• 1 tablespoon loose tea (of your choice)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon water
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter

Equipment:
Food processor

Instructions:
1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
3. Pulse the tea leaves in a food processor until the tea leaves are made very fine.
4. In a bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together. Add the loose tea.
5. With a mixer, add the vanilla, water, and butter to the bowl and mix until dough is formed. Form the dough into a disk onto a piece of wax or parchment paper and chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. After it has firmed up, roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to about 1/2” thick.
6. Cut the dough with a small cookie cutter of whatever shape you like.
7. Toss each cookie in a bowl of granulated sugar to coat.
8. Place the cookies on parchment-lined baking sheets and bake until the edges are just brown, about 12 minutes.
9. Remove them from the oven and then transfer to wire racks.

My friend Arlen loved the recipe, so I passed it to her, and she made an Earl Grey and Chamomile tea cookie. Check out her post about it on her blog La Bonbonniere.