Brown Sugar & Black Tea Roll-out Cookies

By gocatgo

With cookies like this you don’t need much: all that is really needed is butter, sugar, flour, and some type of liquid to bring it all together. When paired up with the brown sugar they add a very subtle but lovely touch to an otherwise boring butter cookie.

Ingredients

• COOKIES:
• 1 stick butter (1/2 cup)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup brewed black tea
• Pinch salt
• 1 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• GLAZE:
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons water
• Naturally colored sugar:
• Sugar
• Baby spinach leaf
• Few pomegranate seeds

Details

Servings 3
Preparation time 20mins
Cooking time 35mins

Preparation

Step 1

Start off by brewing the black tea. I used 1 tea bag and brewed it in a small amount of water, only about half a cup. This yielded a really subtle black tea flavor but you can brew it with 2 to 3 tea bags if you want a stronger flavor. Do this first so it has plenty of time to cool down and won’t melt the butter when added to the dough.

Mix together your brown sugar and butter. This is easiest if the butter is soft but you can also cut them together with a pastry cutter – mix so that the sugar is coated but small chunks of butter are fine. Add the black tea in with the butter/sugar mixture and loosely mix it in – it won’t be smooth but that’s not a problem.

In a separate bowl mix together the flour and baking soda so they are evenly dispersed, then slowly add these dry ingredient into the butter, sugar and tea mixture. The mixture should be fairly solid, but not so stiff it can’t be rolled out. Stick the dough in the fridge for at least 15 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Meanwhile set up a place to roll out the cookies, like a large cutting board or other flat surface. sprinkle a little flour and spread it out. Do the same with a large cookie sheet, or you can cover with parchment paper or foil.

Bake for 7 to 9 minutes or until they are toasty brown around the edges. Repeat for the other half the dough, then for all of the trimmings of dough that weren’t used in the first 2 roll outs. You can knead it back together, let it rest in the fridge and keep doing this until all the dough it gone. The cookies towards the end will have slightly more flour incorporated but it doesn’t change the flavor too much.

When they come out of the oven let them rest for 1 minute on the pan, then at least 10 minutes on a cooling rack.

Once you’ve gotten in the groove of rolling, cutting and baking the cookies you can make your colored sugars

I did this on two separate plates with raised edges, adding about 1/4th cup of organic sugar to both. Just work the pomegranate seeds into the sugar one at a time, removing the hard inner seed with each one. You could also do this with pomegranate juice by dropping in 1 drop at a time. Add until it is your desired color but keep in mind it won’t get too red without the sugar getting too wet, so i settled for a more subtle pink color.

For the spinach I only used 1 leaf and it gave it a good color. Because i used baby spinach it all worked in when i rubbed it into the sugar and there was nothing to remove. You could also do this with spinach juice by adding one drop at time but not too much for sake of flavor.

To make the glaze you simply add the 2 tablespoons water and 2 tablespoons sugar and heat in a pan until bubbling. Let bubble for about 30 to 60 seconds and then pull from the heat. This will make a sticky sugar syrup that when brushed on the cooled cookies will help the colored sugar stick. Just be sure to be gentle with these as the sugar is held on fairly delicately. If you put it in ziplock and let them rustle around, you’ll find as i did that the sugar has fallen off.

To customize this recipe you can swap out regular or turbinado sugar for the brown sugar, you can use replace half of the flour with whole wheat to make it a little more hardy, add in seasonings like cinnamon or nutmeg, or you can replace the black tea for any other liquid like milk or juice. You could even replace the butter with non-dairy margarine to make them vegan.

Enjoy!