Roopa
My friend Chris is coming to town in a few weeks, and we were chatting about having a baking date. We ended up deciding on Earl Grey cupcakes with cardamom icing (which I am far too excited about). I mentioned this to Warren, my good friend who was in town today, and he got equally excited. After lengthy Earl Grey discussions, we decided to just be fat kids and bake Earl Grey cookies as our hang out.
And by that I mean him and my friend Gillian hung out at my house while I baked cookies.
CANDIED LEMON PEELS
I basically followed this process exactly, but with reduced ingredients. This still made about twice as many peels as needed. I also started with these, as they need to be on the stove for a good hour, so I baked the cookies and made the glaze in that time.
INGREDIENTS
- 2 lemons
- 1 – 1.5 cups of granulated sugar
- several cups of water
DIRECTIONS
- Grate the rind off of ½ lemon and set aside.
- Squeeze all of the juice out of the lemons (without deforming them excessively) into a cup, and set aside.
- Cut the lemons into 1/4″ strips, and remove the insides.
- Cut the lemon rind strips into thirds (or whatever size you deem appropriate).
- Put the strips into water and bring to a boil. After the water comes to a boil, drain and refill with water. Do this step three times (water boils three times).
- Add 2/3 cup of sugar to as much water as needed to cover the lemons (1 – 2 cups). Bring to a boil, and then put on low heat. Leave over heat until the white parts become translucent (40 minutes – 1 hour).*
- After they have finished, leave them in syrup to stay soft, or remove them if you want them dried. Roll in sugar to get crystallized effect.
*I used less sugar than the original recipe. It seemed excessive for something I was planning to dump out, and they seemed to turn out fine.
So many lemons!
If you like the smell of lemon, this step is pretty wonderful
Sugar coated and (allegedly) delicious
EARL GREY SUGAR COOKIES (makes 12 – 15)
INGREDIENTS
- 1 cup flour
- ¼ tsp. baking soda
- pinch of salt
- 3 packages Earl Grey tea (I used Stash)
- ½ cup softened butter
- ½ cup sugar
- 1.5 tsp. vanilla
DIRECTIONS
- Line cookie sheets with parchment paper and pre-heat oven to 350F.
- Mix flour, baking soda, salt, and the tea from inside the teabags together in a bowl, and set aside.
- Mix butter and sugar until creamy, and add vanilla.
- Add flour mixture to butter mixture in two parts until a dough is formed.
- Spoon ~1 tbsp. balls of cookie dough onto the sheets*
- Bake for ~11 minutes, rotating pans halfway through.
Note: These cookies can also be chilled and rolled out, but I was lazy.
*They spread out quite a bit in the oven, so leave ample room.
WHITE CHOCOLATE LEMON GLAZE*
INGREDIENTS
- 20g butter
- 30g white chocolate chips
- 2 tbsp. lemon juice
- grated lemon rind of ½ lemon
DIRECTIONS
- Melt the butter and chocolate chips – I used a microwave.
- Add in lemon juice and lemon rind until desired consistency is achieved. Mix thoroughly
*Admittedly, I just added in amounts of things that seemed appropriate and guesstimated how much I put in. I’m normally very engineer and absolutely against these half-assed measurements, but it didn’t seem so critical for a chocolate lemon glaze, and I was mostly making it up. Realistically, you can’t go wrong with these ingredients. I think that icing sugar would typically be used in a glaze, but I wanted something a little less sweet and thicker, which is why I used chocolate as the base.
Chateau Gateau 