Lavender Cookies

Spring time; my favourite season of the year where dormant buds burst into a sea of rainbow blooms amidst the drones of hard-working bees, clouds pour with rain then make way for the glorious sun against the endless expanse of azure. Of course, there’s also today-wild and unforgiving wet weather, perfect to stay indoors and work on my blog. On good-weather afternoons, I enjoy excursions with Joshua in his pram, walking anywhere and everywhere, pausing to admire the cherry blossom trees, the wild daisies that line the side-walks and the majestic pink saucer magnolia trees – absolutely stunning! I am stoked that walking has kick-started my sluggish metabolism and I’ve since shed 2 kgs off my stagnant, 6 months worth of baby weight in the last 2 weeks!

I know it’s ironic to have weight loss and buttery cookies in the same post but whilst I’ve been reserving any baking pleasure or opportunity for customised cake orders, I’ve had a lavender cookie craze for the last 2 weeks. I think it’s a nice way to welcome Spring by perfuming delicious butter cookies with culinary/edible lavender buds. I also toyed around with my new lettering stencil/stamp, pressing ‘foodsze’ into my dough cutouts which unfortunately due to uneven pressure, only half the alphabets turned out. However, these buttery and crisp gems are incredibly addictive and so easy to make so I gave most of them away to friends and hubby to take to work. I borrowed a shortbread recipe from the Australian Women’s Weekly: BAKE but instead of chocolate shortbread stars, I substituted chocolate with lavender buds and played around with the amount of icing sugar. I found the original recipe which calls for 160g  of sugar way too sweet for my liking  so you may adjust this. Rice flour lends these shortbread cookies a crisp texture.

So make a cuppa, sit back, relax, smell the flowers and enjoy these buttery morsels. Oh and hello Spring!

Lavender Cookies

250 g butter, softened
2 – 2.5 tsp dried culinary lavender buds ( edible grade e.g. lavandula angustifolia or English Lavender)
140 g – 150 g icing sugar (140 g for less sweet, 150 g for sweeter)
185 g plain flour
100 g rice flour
1 tsp vanilla extract

  1. Beat butter, icing sugar, lavender buds and vanilla extract in medium bowl with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Stir in sifted flours in two batches – you may do this in  the machine until they resemble coarse breadcrumbs. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth. Roll dough between sheets of baking paper until 1 cm thick; refrigerate 30 minutes.
  2. Preheat oven to 160oC or 140oC fan force. Line oven trays with baking paper.
  3. With a 5cm- 6cm width/diameter cookie cutter, cut out shapes from the dough. Place them about 4 cm apart on oven trays. While cookies are baking, roll out remaining dough as per Step 1 and refrigerate to firm up dough before cutting out cookies for the next round of baking. 
  4. Bake cookies for 20 minutes. Cool in trays. Cookies will still be soft when taken out of the oven but they will crisp up when completely cooled.
  5. Store in an air-tight jar.

My amazing Strawberry Ruffles Lavender die every autumn to winter but spring back to life in its own pot (I should really transplant it to the ground)

100g of dried culinary lavender is enough to  make lots and lots of cookies!

lettering stencil/stamp

Lavender cookie hearts for a friend

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