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  :)

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