Firing up the oven this weekend to make your favorite Christmas cookies? With some loose leaf tea from yours truly, you can put a new twist on old favorites and delight your friends and family.
You may have tried baking with tea before in the past without fruitful results.
If your previous attempts have been to no avail, here are a few secrets to help you succeed. First, ditch the tea bags. Loose leaf tea is the way to go, and not just because the quality and flavor are better. Steeping tea bags will dilute the flavor too much. Secondly, make sure you choose a strong flavor. Citrus is a good option you’re trying to inject new life into your sugar cookie recipe. Lastly, you want to make sure you combine your loose leaf tea with unsalted butter.
Throwing loose leaf tea directly into the batter won’t be very helpful, but using butter as a vehicle works wonders. Butter is fatty enough to bind to other material and malleable to where it can be easily mixed with tea leaves.
Ready to try it out? Just follow these instructions from CupCakeProject.com and you’ll be on your way.
Instructions:
- In a small saucepan, melt the butter until just liquid.
- Add the tea leaves.
- Continue heating the mixture for about 5 minutes on low heat.
- Remove from the heat and allow to stand for another 5 minutes or until the butter is discernibly tinted by the tea leaves.
- Pour the mixture through a fine sieve, pressing hard on the tea leaves and then discarding them. This is the part where you will undoubtedly end up with some butter that you can’t get off of the leaves. I encourage you to press as hard as you can, but not to obsess about lost butter – it’s for a good cause.
- Let the butter come to room temperature and then use it as you would regular butter in your baked goods.