Tea Parties and Mint Citrus Shortbread

About a week ago I was texting my sister about her return home for the Memorial Day weekend...it went like this:

Me: I'm feeling in the mood for a tea party this weekend...you down for some radical pinky up shenanigans? I need to christen my trendy tea pot and I'll make cucumber sammies!

Laura: YES

Me: And scones? We also need a third sister if it's truly to be Downtown Abbey enough, but we will make due. 

Laura: Eh, we'll stick a bonnet on Ginger and call it good. 

Me: Yes. She can be the spinster one who can't get married, obviously.

And Ginger? That's our dog. She doesn't like bonnets so we just let her eat the cookies sans head gear. Anyway, sometimes we do weird things and and plan really British tea parties for Memorial Day weekend. It's a thing, this weirdness. But it's a good thing. It brings tea! Four different kinds of tea, cucumber sandwiches, cracker and cheese...it's a good good thing.

Tea parties can be awfully inspiring. I had a bajillion and one ideas running through my head as soon as I started planning for a tea party. Petit fours, mini pound cakes, cream puffs, homemade english muffins...the options were endless. But I wanted two things for this particular tea escapade:
1. Light and tasty, matches perfectly with a warm cup of tea...
2. Had a "spring time" flavor...
3. Preferably made with herbs from our garden...
and
4. I wanted it to be pretty. I mean, it was a tea party, it's not too much to ask that it be cute, right?

So I took a shortbread recipe, tinkered with it, (I never can leave any recipe alone. Even when I swear I'm going to leave it completely alone and execute it as is...I end up altering something. I think it's a disease or syndrome, it's that bad.) and then decorated them nearly to death.

Also, can we take a moment and appreciate the fact that I own not one, but two types of tea pot cookie cutters? I mean, that's only two less cutters than actual tea pots. (I kinda have a need to have as many tea pots/cups/items as physically possible.) Yes. Mhm.
Okay, moment is over, cookies are now taking over this blog.

Cookies...

Cookies...

And more cookies?

Yes. 

Cookies. 

This dough is uh-may-zing. It rolls like a dream, doesn't need to be chilled, and mixes up in one fell swoop. If you ever feel like a tea party that is low on the drama (No one dying or financial situations going awry like at the Downton Abbey's resident's tea parties) these are a must.







Mint Citrus Shortbread Cookies
3/4 pound (pounds, not cups!) butter
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 1/2 cups flour
1 egg
2 Tablespoons of fresh chopped lemon verbena
2 Tablespoons of fresh chopped mint
zest and juice of one lime
Stick all the ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer and stir until it combines into a beautiful dough. Turn it out onto a cold counter dusted lightly with (if your kitchen is warm, you may need to chill for 20 minutes. But this step is unnecessary most of the time.) Roll the dough to 1/4 inch thickness and cut with shaped cutters. Bake at 350 for 9 to 
13 minutes or until lightly golden on the edges. Watch them carefully so they do not over bake. Frost and decorate with royal icing or leave them plain. (They are delicious either way, but without the icing you can really taste the fresh herbs and citrus...)

Why Coffee is Good in Cookies

It has already been established that Valentine’s Day is awesome.

There is no room for debate on this issue because I unfairly justly implemented cupcakes into my argument. 

Yes. That means I win.

Do you know what else wins? Coffee-Chocolate flavored things. I think this flavor combination is called “Mocha”, but since I am not a coffee drinker I am really not an expert on the subject.

Okay, we are taking a detour here because everyone just went “WAHTTT? You don’t like coffee? Aren’t you a college student living in Seattle? You’re crazy. Coffee is so amazing. It keeps you awake and it tastes good. I love coffee! How can you not like coffee? Coffee…” I don’t like coffee. It tastes like burnt water. Yes, even the so called “good” coffee. It’s gross. I drink it maybe once a month when I am on the verge of physically harming myself because I am so tired and I need caffeine. Usually a cup of tea is enough caffeine for me, (okay, detour within a detour: TEA is amazing. Like the polar opposite of coffee. Okay, back to detour one…) but sometimes when I only have two hours of sleep behind me and I have no hope of getting to bed before 1 or 2 am I have to resort to the evil of coffee to get me through. Ugh.

There. Detour over. We are back to happy things like Valentine’s Day and cookies.

Cookies! Chocolate Coffee cookies to be exact. I usually don’t decorate cookies with Royal icing for two reasons. Reason one is that it takes foreverrrrrr. For. Ev. Er. I could probably get faster if I did it more often and practiced. But I don’t because it takes forever. As aforementioned. But really, it took me about five hours to make thirty cookies start to finish. That’s a lot of hours, amigos.

Reason number two: it just doesn't taste as good as it looks.  And while I like things to look pretty, I like them to taste good more. (That was a terrible sentence grammatically speaking. But it’s okay, this blog is a judge free zone.) Royal icing is so super sweet with no flavor other than just: SUGAR OVERLOAD FLAVOR!! But the chocolate coffee cookies are so intensely dark tasting that a sugar crust to go with it is perfect. It is pretty hard to find a fault with pretty cookies that taste good. :D

And they are perfect for Valentine’s Day! 

• Chocolate Coffee Cutout Cookies
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 cup  butter, softened
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon vanilla 
• 1 Tablespoon instant coffee granules
• 1/2 teaspoon salt*
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 cup  cocoa
• 2 1/4 cups flour
• Beat together the sugar, butter, baking powder, vanilla, espresso powder, and salt until fluffy.  Beat in the egg. Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl again.Whisk together the cocoa and flour, then beat into the egg and butter mixture until well blended. Refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes, or up to overnight. Preheat your oven to 375°F. Lightly grease baking sheets. Divide the dough in half. Sprinkle both sides of each piece with extra flour, to keep the dough from sticking. Working with one piece of dough at a time, roll 1/4 in thick. Cut into heart shapes with a cookie cutter. Place the cookies on the prepared baking sheets and bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until their edges are firm and you start to smell chocolate/coffee wafting through your flour covered kitchen. Allow to cool completely before decorating with icing of your choice. 
  
  
  
  

Second Cake of the Class

My "Final" cake for Course 1.

I didn't go to last week's lesson so I was a little behind. I was off my groove for some reason so it doesn't look as perfect as I wanted. But that's good! It means I can practice more and get better!

Plus, it was Neopolitan flavored, (Chocolate, Strawberry, Vanilla) so it tasted AWESUM. I was actually going to do a vanilla cake layer but it fell apart when I stacked it. I was frustrated at first but then I got to get my hands in all that strawberry filling vanilla cakey crumbly mess to reassemble it and I felt much better.  

As far as the decorating goes, this is my very first attempt (ever in my whole life) to make icing flowers. My buttercream was stiffer than concrete and I had no way of fixing that at my class, so piping was difficult to say the least. I tried to do these roses dozens and dozens of times but really only these five were acceptable enough to actually put on the cake.

All in all I have a few changes I'm going to make for the next cake I do like this one. 

-The fresh strawberry filling will be fluffier frosting, not buttercream. The strawberries need to be diced and mixed in instead of sliced and layered. It makes cutting and presetation better. 

-Thinner icing for easier piping. 

-Better roses, I'm going to practice. 

-Better icing job in general. There were a lot of crumbs in the frosting and it wasn't as smooth as it could have been.

-I think I'll do the roses in pink. Some more color would be pretty I think. The chocolate decorations were nice looking, but it would be better with some dusty rosy pink flowers. And my green was borrowed icing from someone else. Next time I'll make it more of a natural green leaf color.

Next cake? Wednesday! My mom needs a dessert for her bible study! :) 

Cake Decorating.

I've signed up for a cake decorating class. I've wanted to get better at my cake decorating and all, seeing as I plan on making them for the rest of my life. Well, today was the first cake day!

I actually baked a lemon cake, filled it with orange marmelade, frosted the whole thing with lemon buttercream and triumphantly carried it off to my class.

I was a little sad that we could only decorate it with techniques we've been taught by our instructor. We have only learned three things so far so it was kinda limiting. Are you ready for this? The three things I could use to decorate my fantastic citrus cake were:

The dot:

If you want to use "the dot" while decorating, put on the "dot" tip, and pipe a dot. It's excrutiatingly difficult. I promise. Second up: the star.

Now, if you want to use "the star" for decorating, apply the "star" tip, and pipe a star. Sometimes it can be tricky! It will leave a little point if you don't stop squeezing the bag before starting a new star. It adds a whole new demension to the technique world....However! The third technique is the hardest of all. The outline...

Pheooo boy. This is tough stuff, my friend. Tough with a capital T. It's like a dot...but it keeps going until it's a line. And then, if you're good enough, the line will eventually turn into a picture -like this superb example of a heart shown above.
Alright alright, I'll end my sarcasm. I just kinda get a little bored in the basics class, that's all. But we are going to learn cool stuff next week I think so I'm really really excited!  Anyway, here are the results of my first class. I thought it wasn't that great, but my family said it was...
"This is awesome! I love you...*hug*" -John Mark
"Very nice, I want to eat it." -My dad
"It looks classy, honey." -My mom
"You're cake looks nice, Candice" -Laura
"It's beautiful." -Jorge

They also thought it was tasty. I couldn't snatch a picture of it til after it had been accosted and sliced into, but you get the idea.

Rainbow Blast

Me and my mom made pumpkin cupcakes yesterday.
They are uh-mazing! I am definitely making them for the fall ladies event for The Duvall Church this month.
My little brother wanted to decorate one. So I piped on frosting and gave him all the nuts, coconut, sprinkles, and sugars I had for him to customize his very own.
He called it rainbow blast.

Unfortunately he only took a bite, and then remembered he had chores to do and forgot completely about it.
It's ok, I ate the rest.

I think, when I ever open a bakery shop, I'll let little kids decorate their own cupcakes if they want to. Look at how great they turn out!