Lavender tea time cookies

I am beginning to dream of my garden.

*FLOWERS * VEGGIES * HERBS

One of my favorite herbs is LAVENDER.  I love it's clean scent, and the flowers are divine in the herb garden as well as landscape!

Today I am going to show you how to make sweet little tea cookies enhanced with culinary lavender and a simple royal icing treatment -perfect for a formal tea party OR a quiet afternoon spent alone with spring seed catalogs!

To begin, I made a regular sugar cookie dough.  After I had rolled and cut out the shapes, I gently sprinkled the tops with dried lavender.  Fortunately, I don't have to purchase edible lavender buds because I had harvested it from my herb garden and then dried it.  

If you have never grown it, I encourage you to give it a try.  It is extremely easy to grow, has a long bloom time, and requires next to no care.

I could have added it into my dough when mixing, but I didn't for two reasons.  One, I wanted to go very sparingly because lavender can easily overwhelm in flavor - a little goes a very long way!  Two, I wanted to see it on the top so it would give my cookies a textured background for the icing treatment.  

After baking and cooling, I gave each cookie a quick spritz of food coloring spray.

See the little flecks of lavender?

I did half in purple, and half in pink.

I didn't spray the entire cookie, only a diagonal spray across the center.  A quick tip about food color sprays:  try it on some paper before the cookie, because it has a tendency to shoot out some big blobs on the initial spray.

I made four different colors of icing -

LIGHT PURPLE  DARK PURPLE   GREEN   PINK

I used the green first to make the straight lines of the stems.  The first stems go from a center point up the cookie.

And then then go from the center point down the cookie.

See the blobs of color spray?  You wouldn't want that on your cookie!

Now you are just going to start adding dots of the two shades of purple.  

I used two shades because it gives the design more interest and depth.

Now with the pink icing, you make a simple ribbon - two loops, two  flowing lines, and a dot for the knot (hey, that rhymed!).

And there you have it!  

When you deconstruct a design into lines and shapes, it make the execution less intimidating.  You can make lines and dots, right?

I believe it is time for afternoon tea and dreams of spring!

I can't wait to show you what Mr. Enchanted just built me for starting seeds!  I will be posting it soon  :)

Sharing with
The Shabby Creek Cottage

Pint Sized Baker

Tea Time Tuesday

Honeysuckle Bus Stop

Show me your Plaid party

Mix it up Monday

On the Menu Monday at StoneGable

Skip to My Lou

Melt in Your Mouth MondayMake it Pretty Monday

French cookies part 4 Lavender vanilla bean macarons

BY JOVE I THINK I'VE GOT IT!

With trepidation, fear, and determination, I marched back into my kitchen and did battle with the macaron.  I aged,whipped, folded, piped, banged, dried, double panned, tossed salt over my shoulder, and prayed.  And it worked.

Insert sound of maniacal laughter. 

And now a few facts and tips.  I used the macaron recipe from Martha Stewart for Parisian macaron, and you can view it by clicking here.  Almond flour is called for in all macaron recipes, and in a fit of thriftiness I made my own by grinding up almonds in a food processor.  I didn't grind mine up finely enough because you can see little lumps in the cookie.  Next time, I either need to shell out money for the almond flour or go do a better job of pulverizing my almonds.  They still taste wonderful, but it does affect the smoothness of the tops. 

See what I'm talking about?  Now for the little tricks I used this time. 

1.  I aged my egg whites
2.  I banged the baking sheets a couple of times on the counter (scaring my dog) to help reduce air bubbles.
3.  After piping the batter onto the baking sheet, I let it dry to the touch - about 30 minutes.
4.  I used two baking sheets, one on top of the other for baking.

Not one cracked top, and they all had the desired little "feet".  That's me laughing maniaclly again.

And now, on to the filling.  A lot of macarons are filled with Swiss meringue buttercream, and that sounded like a very good plan to me.  Once again, I turn to Martha for the recipe.  For this somewhat time consuming but easy recipe for SMB click here.  The amount of butter is truly horrifying, but as I have said before, it makes quite a large batch and stores wonderfully in the fridge or freezer.  Just try not to think about it too much.

The filling is where my flavorings went.  I added a very small amount of culinary lavender and some vanilla bean.  Tinted a soft lavender color, it just looked beautiful.  A word of caution here:  use only the tiniest bit of lavender.  I added just a little too much and it was too strong. 

For me (and Tony) the chocolate champagne macarons were the best tasting, but these were the best looking.  Next time I make the chocolate ones, I will add some brown food coloring to the batter to give a nice rich color to the cookie. 

Tomorrow will conclude French cookie week with a visit from Marie Antoinette.  Until then, heureux Jeudi!

My link friends today are
Its a Keeper Thursday
House of Hepworths
Between Naps on the Porch
No Minimalist Here