My cookie recipe!

To be a part of the Great Food Bloggers Cookie Swap, we had to agree to make our recipe available on our blog for others to view. So, here is my recipe (and a brief back story) on my Earl Grey Tea Butter Crisp Cookies with White Chocolate Filling!

For The Great Food Bloggers Cookie Swap, I wanted to showcase my favorite tea (which has also been adapted into my favorite type of latte) and my favorite childhood cookie all into one delicate cookie. 

For starters, there is nothing in the world like a nice hot mug of Earl Grey Tea. With the flavor of bergamot and a hint of vanilla, it has quite a distinct taste and aroma, but it is also a strong early-morning-wake-you-up kind of tea. There are not many teas that I can handle on an empty stomach first thing in the morning, but Earl Grey always finds a way to make the first taste of morning delicious as well as give me the early jump start without the jittery feeling I can receive from coffee.  I typically take my Earl Grey with a splash of whole, half and half, soy or almond milk.

Within the past year, I discovered a drink that incorporated my love of Earl Grey Tea and milk, but with a more involved process in the form of a latte. The drink: A London Fog, the fixing’s: Earl Grey Tea, Steamed Milk and a bit of Vanilla Syrup.  Light, frothy and heavenly…. my idea of a perfect, yet slightly fancy caffeinated beverage concoction. 

So, the inspiration for my cookies definitely started with the desire to turn a London Fog into the form of a cookie, but figuring out which direction to take with the cookie, took quite a bit more thought. An obvious way to showcase the flavor of milk and vanilla would be through white chocolate. Since White chocolate has more of a subtle background flavor, it pairs incredibly well and brings a balance to recipes that include more distinct flavors like raspberries, cranberries, macadamia nuts, dark chocolate and coconut to name a few. At first, I envisioned a chunky, moist, chewy cookie full of white chocolate chips, but it didn’t take me long to realize that going in that direction would absolutely not work for me, my taste and this cookie.

When I think of Europe, I think of culinary refinement, of gourmet dishes that showcase the epitome of flavor genius without the need for volume. Small but packed with flavor, forcing you to savor this division of heaven. Ok, yea, I am going too far, but gourmet is not about getting stuffed with passable food, it is about the natural essence, the refinement and the experience of food.  Also, when I think of Europe and especially London, I think of teatime, tea parties, bite size pastries, and other buttery sugary delights. My favorite cookies growing up can actually be found on the cookie shelf of most U.S. grocery stores. After much research, I honestly still have no clue where they derive from other than being named after a city in France, and I may have to call a tie between another one of my favorite cookies growing up, the Dutch Windmill cookies, however, my top favorite cookies of all time, are the Pepperidge Farm Distinctive Bordeaux Cookies.  Why? Well, because these cookies are thin, crisp, have a slight caramel flavor, go perfect with coffee and tea and are just down right…distinctive.

Thin, crisp and full of flavor described the texture and style that I knew would be most appropriate for my cookie. However, I needed to figure out how to tackle my next concern; how to incorporate the Earl Grey tea. To start, I have seen a few people, (including Martha Stewart) create a Earl Grey Tea cookie recipe, and two major things didn’t impress me: 1. They ALL literally included the ground tealeaves in the dough and 2. They were ALL shortbread cookies. I knew that neither of these direction I would take, especially because I did not wish to overwhelm this distinct cookie with pieces of tea leaves, gritty leaf crumbs and pockets of flavor that did not have a chance to “steep” or be enveloped into the other ingredients. And I also wanted a thin buttery crisp of a cookie.  What I chose to do was to melt my butter and add the full leaf tea directly to the melted butter, bringing the mix to a boil to let out the flavors of the tea, and then straining to extract the entire flavor from the leaves into the butter. The most important thing to point out here is to use QUALITY Earl Grey Tea. Go to a freak’n tea store and purchase 2 oz. of quality, fresh Earl Grey Tea for goodness sake!!!. Please do not rip open tea bags from a box, because not only are these bags often full of the “shake” left over at the bottom of the quality full leaf factory bags, but the bagged tea only has a hint of what fresh full leaved tea encompasses, including the most prominent feature of Earl Grey, the Bergamot.

Another major thing that I will point out which makes my process much different than most and is extremely important to insure that these cookies thin out while baking to fulfill that thin, crisp and buttery description is to include cooled MELTED butter into the dough, instead of solid room temperature butter. Even though the dough will be placed in the fridge to harden, the consistency of melted butter added to the dough changes its consistency quite a bit. Why? Well, while solid room temperature butter helps for the dough to keep its shape and form, for these cookies, it unfortunately causes them to lose their ability to form thin edges and for the ingredients to separate just enough to create its crisp texture and completely thin interior without separating entirely or having a chewy undercooked interior. Cutting thinner slices of a mix that has solid butter does not make a difference! These cookies are guaranteed to look as though they are melting on your cookie sheet and almost quadrupling in size, so it is very important to roll your dough into a small cylinder/roll of about 1.5 inches and to give them each several inches of space on the cookie sheet and of course to refrigerate the dough for about 1-2 hours. All of this will be explained in detail in my recipe and instructions below, but wanted you to better understand the need for this melted butter process.

Earl Grey Tea Butter Crisp Sandwich Cookies with White Chocolate Filling

Ingredients:

2 Sticks Unsalted Butter

2 TBS Full Leaf Quality Earl Grey Tea

1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

¾ tsp salt

½ cup sugar

½ cup light brown sugar (packed)

1 tsp pure vanilla extract (I use Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla)

1 egg  

1 Bag of White Chocolate Morsels for filling

Instructions:

 -Place butter in small saucepan over medium heat until fully melted.  Mix in 2 heaping tablespoons of Full Leaf Earl Grey Tea and turn to high heat. Bring mixture to full boil for about 30 seconds then reduce heat to medium-low. Let mixture steep on medium-low for about 2-3 minutes or until buttery froth floating on mixture is a light to medium brown. Remove from heat and let sit for another 5 minutes.

-Place a metal strainer over a small clean heat-safe bowl. Slowly pour all melted butter/tea mixture into the strainer. Use the back of a metal spoon to extract any remaining butter out of the tea leaves through the strainer.

-Set the strained butter aside until it comes to room temperature and you are ready to incorporate it into cookie dough. If you are a fast mover, then set it in the fridge for up to 15 minutes.

-In a medium bowl, sift flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

-In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, add both sugars. vanilla extract and egg and mix on low speed until incorporated.

-With mixer still on low, add flour mixture in three parts alternating with the melted butter and beginning and ending with flour. Mix until just combined.

-Tear out a piece of parchment paper (roughly 16” long) and add about 1 ½ cups of batter to paper. The batter will be thin and very fragile during this state, but try your best to roll into a long cylinder about 1.5 inches thick. (Do this again with another sheet of parchment paper until you run out of batter). Refrigerate until hardened (about an hour).

-Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Use an oven thermometer to make sure. Accurate oven temp is extremely important when baking anything, ESPECIALLY thin crisp cookies. Take hardened dough out of fridge. ( If your roll wasn’t very straight the first time, use the heat of your hands to roll to a more symmetrical cylinder and place back in fridge.) Set aside 2 large baking pans/cookie sheets.

Cut cookies into ¼ slices and place on ungreased cookie sheet/baking pan giving them about 3 inches between one another.

-Place in preheated oven for no more than 8 minutes. After 8 minutes, these babies will burn fast, so you may want to check the cookies at 7 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside until cooled. Remove with a cookie spatula.

-In a double boiler, melt about 1 cup of white chocolate (more if needed). Pair cookies up based on similar sizes and shapes. Once chocolate has been melted, use a small frosting spatula or butter knife to spread melted white chocolate onto inside of one of the paired cookies. (These cookies are very thin and crispy, so be very careful not to break them in half by the pressure of the spatula. I placed them in the cup of my hand for better support). After the one cookie has been spread with a generous amount of white chocolate, place 2^nd cookie on top with slight pressure. Continue until all cookies have been used. Let cookies cool and enjoy!!