Vanilla and Earl Grey Tea Cookies

I spent the best part of last week in Leeds on a training course for work. Generally speaking being away from Hubby ~ our first nights apart since we've been married ~ and my normal home comforts (I'm hoping you'll understand why I include my range cooker in this category) for a week is not something I get overly excited about. For Leeds I'll make an exception though ... but only for as long as one of my nearest and dearest friends lives there!

Mafia and I met nearly a decade ago when we both ended up working at the same Girl Scout Camp in America for a summer. Just a short note of explanation on her name (which isn't really Mafia) there was a rule that all counsellors needed a 'camp' name, it was kinda like an alter ego almost, the theory being that the kids and counsellors would use the camp name while you were on duty and then when you manged to get your two hours off each day (yup, you read that right, two whole hours off a day!) you could be called by your real name to differentiate being on duty and not. The kids would spend all week trying to find out what our real names were and then at the end of the final camp programme we tired and weary counsellors would each have to get up and reveal our true identities to the campers and their various family members that had come to collect them. Nearly a decade later and Mafia always has been and will always continue to be Mafia to me!

So, to cut a long story short, being sent to Leeds for work was great cause I got to spend time with Mafia, which doesn't happen very often for one reason or another. On Wednesday night Mafia made a wonderful meal which included a Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding for dessert that was served with Clotted Cream Ice Cream. My favourite! Pretty sure this is where just about all of my 4 pound weight increase came from this week but what's a few pounds between old friends?

The idea for these came about as a bit of a collaboration. Firstly, to say thank you for Mafia's wonderful generosity I decided to bake her some cookies that can be posted down. And then, while travelling down to Leeds on the train I was reading Dorrie Greenspan's 'Paris Sweets' where she describes the most amazing sounding tart that is made with a pastry infused with Earl Grey tea and as it just so happens Mafia's favourite tea is ... [drum roll] ... Earl Grey! I was quite intrigued by the idea of using tea in cooking so did some further investigation and discovered that it can be used in a variety of different recipes such as these very yummy cookies.

Earl Grey Tea Cookies

1 cup plain flour

1/4 cup vanilla caster sugar

1/4 icing sugar

1 tbsp Earl Grey tea leaves (I used the contents from 2 Vanilla Earl Grey teabags)

Pinch of salt

1/2 tsp vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste (I used a bit less than 1/2 tsp as a find the flavour more concentrated than in the extract)

1 tsp water

125g unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 180C. Pulse together all the dry ingredients in a food processor until the tea leaves are pulverised.

Add Vanilla, water and butter. Pulse together until a dough is formed. Form the dough into a log onto apiece of wax or parchment paper (next time I'm using clingfilm as I tend to have more success!). Wrap the paper around and roll the log smooth. Either freeze the dough now for using at another time or chill for at least 30 mins.

When chilled, slice the log into 1/3" thick pieces. Place on baking sheets and bake until the edges are just brown, about 10 mins. Let cool on sheets for 5 mins, then transfer to wore racks.

Makes 24

Adapted from The Kitchn

I love the speckled look of these cookies, so rustic but very comforting at the same time. The flavour of them is amazing as well, the vanilla really comes through at first and then the Earl Grey flavour comes through quite subtly but really rounds out the vanilla. Because these ones are being made as a gift I decided to roll the dough out and use a cookie cutter to make the cookies but when reading through some of the comments on previous posts for this recipe some people said that they had problems with the cookies sticking to the baking sheet so I used baking paper to line the trays. Not sure if this is the reason for my cookies spreading a bit during cooking and some of them ended up loosing their cookie cutter shape and merging in with their next door neighbours. I did take a little bit of time taking some photo's once the cookie dough was on the tray as well which may not have helped either so next time there will be no dilly dallying.