Hello all! So I made the Earl Grey and lavender shortbread cookies for Unplugged and got several requests to post the recipe, which I’m happy to do! Base cookie is a recipe I found online, recipe makes 2 dozen cookies at their size, but see below for my thoughts on that. The only changes I made were starting with bagged tea and cooking it slightly less than recommended. The reason for bagged tea was two fold; first I had no time to order in whole leaf tea, and second, bag tea is already ground fine. I still ran it through my baking grinder, but I don’t (yet) have a machine that can get the leaves as small as starting with bags. Two boxes of tea made three and a half doubled batches of the shortbread, with 3.5 tablespoons of ground leaves per double batch. As for less baking time, I baked them till gold on the edges for the first batch, as digested, but they got unhappily hard. Baking them until just done and barely a different color on the edges made them much tastier, in my opinion.
The glaze is this recipe:
2 cups powdered sugar. MUST be sifted
2+ tablespoons milk
1.5 tablespoons honey, warmed to pouring consistency
1.5 to 2 tablespoons ground lavender flowers
Purple food coloring
Put the sugar and lavender in a bowl with ample whisking room and add 2 tablespoons (approx) of milk and the warmed honey. Whisk until all combined. Drizzle in scant amounts of milk until the glaze reaches a good pouring and leveling consistency. Add food coloring (if desired). Fill into a piping bag and put a large lump in the center of each cookie. A batter filling piping bag tip is great for this, since it’s got a little rubber valve that stops the glaze from escaping between cookies. One batch of this fills not even one double batch of the cookies, but I found making this in bigger batches meant the waiting portion of glaze developed a lumpy crust while I piped the first bag.
My glaze always made a mess under the cookie trays (I used wire cooling racks), and took overnight to harden enough to pack. This recipe freezes VERY well, so can be made well ahead of time.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/claire-robinson/earl-grey-shortbread-cookies-recipe-1917526
Now, I made my cookie logs a little narrower than expected. I apparently can’t measure diameter. ;D Making them just a bit bigger than mine would make them perfect one cookie per bag size, mine were a stupidly in between size.