Citrus Lavender Infused Soft Sugar Cookies with Orange Buttercream

These were one of the cookies at my latest catering event and I had to share the recipe with all of you gorgeous people on the blog.  For one thing, you can never have too many cookie recipes during the holidays. For another thing, do we need another reason to have sugar cookies?! Really?!  I just thought that these little guys just added a lot of character to the dessert table and they were so simple to make!


Citrus and Lavender is probably one of my all-time favorites when it comes to flavor profiles in baking, as long as the lavender isn't so strong that it takes over the finished pastry.  The secret to these cookies is using just one drop of essential oil in the baked cookies and then adding citrus notes. If you use more than a drop, the lavender is too powerful and it takes over the cookies. When I made these for my BFF Gena's Baby Shower, she tasted them and said, "OH these are fabulous! There's just a little something that makes them soooo good but I can't place the flavor. What is it?!" ...and that is how it should be with lavender. Subtle. Sophisticated. Sexy. Are you ready for the secret recipe?

Chef Tess' Citrus Lavender Sugar Cookies

1 ½ cup butter, softened

 ¾ cup granulated sugar

1 ¼ cup brown sugar

3 large eggs

½ cup milk

1 1/2 tsp almond emulsion

1 Tbsp. lemon zest, micro grated

1 drop culinary grade lavender essential oil

4 1/2 cups Organic Grains All-Purpose Flour

½ tsp. salt

2 tsp. baking powder

Directions: Preheat oven to 375° F.  Wash and sanitize all work surfaces, utensils, and hands before handling raw flour and dough. In a mixer with a paddle attachment, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time.  Add emulsion, lemon, lavender, and milk. Stir well. Combine the flour mixture with the creamed butter mixture, just until combined. Scoop by rounded Tablespoon onto ungreased cookie sheet or sheet lined with parchment paper. Wash and sanitize all work surfaces, utensils and hands after handling raw flour and dough.  Bake until lightly golden, about 10-13 minutes. Allow cooling on the baking sheet about 10 minutes before transferring to another location. Store in an airtight container. Yield approx. 5 dozen cookies.  

Orange Buttercream Frosting

3 cups powdered sugar

½ cup butter, softened
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. orange emulsion or 5 drops culinary grade orange essential oil
3-4 Tbsp. hot water

Directions: In a large bowl, beat remaining Frosting ingredients with electric mixer on low speed until creamy. Pipe frosting onto cookies. Top with a sprinkle of a few edible gold pearls on each cookie. 

 After they were finished decorating, I added a little flourish of edible gold spray. 

There you go! Make some amazing sugar cookies!

Always My Very Best,
Your Friend Chef Tess

Homemade Fig Bars (Tutorial 101)

My childhood would not have been complete without my daddy's addiction for fig bars. I don't think I would look at him with the same cute smile if I didn't know he had a weakness for something as simple as a sleeve of figgy bars. There is in fact, nothing on earth that makes me miss him more than seeing a garden full of new seedlings...and a package of fig bars.

So, that being said, today I wanted to show a whole grain, whole food alternative to the premade bars. It will of course, start with some figs. These are dried figs that have soaked 2-3 hours in warm water. I also like to soak them in juice for a slightly different flavor. Pick a juice...any juice.

Once soaked they will start to look tomatoes...but brown with smaller seeds.

Fig filling:

1 lb dried organic figs

1/2 cup honey or rice syrup

1/2 cup lemon juice

1 tsp ground ginger

2tsp vanilla

1/3 cup UltraGel or 1/3 cup corn starch (only use corn starch if you don't plan on home canning the filling)

water or juice (about 3 cups)

Soak the figs in the juice or water for 2-3 hours. Drain juice and discard. Mash fruit with a fork fine or use a meat grinder. I prefer the grinder method. This meat grinder had never been used on meat. Isn't that weird? Just a random fact I'm sure you wanted to know about.

You will end up with this mass of mashed goodness.

Combine all the filling ingredients in a large pan.

Cook until thick over medium heat, about 10 minutes. This will make 3-4 cups of filling. I always make extra and home-can it for use later. Boiling water bath method, 10 minutes.

One cup of filling will make a batch of fig bars. Take that filling and set it aside. You may need to add 1-2 Tablespoons more of the UltraGel to the filling, depending on how thick you want the stuff. I like mine pretty firm...so I add a little more. This works amazingly well for any other kind of jam as well if you want to turn it into a filling for cookies or bars.

My fig bar dough:

1/2 cup butter, softened or 1/2 cup Chocolate Infused Certified Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1/2 cup honey

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking soda

3 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour ( I used spelt flour today)

Directions:

Take honey and butter...and send the honey cliff diving. Wait. I guess the diving is optional. If you use the Chocolate infused olive oil...be prepared for the heavenly flavor...and try not to drink the bottle. I have to hold myself back. It's divine!

Combine the honey, vanilla and soft butter or chocolate olive oil until smooth.

I think I could bathe in this junk. I mean...who wouldn't want to just have their ankles in this stuff?

Add the egg, baking soda and salt. Mix until combined. Add the flour.

Stir by hand about 2 minutes, until a soft but slightly firm dough is formed.

Heavily flour your counter top or work surface. The dough will be rather soft and I don't want any stickin'.
Flour the top of the dough as well.

With a rolling pin, roll dough out until it is about 1/4 inch thin and in the shape of a large rectangle.

Transfer your figgy filling into a pastry bag. That's a cake decorating bag for you who don't know. I have a lot of new students who have no idea what the real name for things could be.

Slice the dough all the way through, 2 1/2 inches wide, all the length of the rolled out dough.

Squeeze the filling out down the center of the dough strip.

The filling should be about 1/2 inch tall and 3/4 inch wide, the full length of the strip.

Very carefully fold the sides around the filling and lightly pinch the dough at the center seam.

Depending on how well you floured your work surface, you may need to use some persuasion in getting the dough up off the board. I've found the use of a small sharp steak knife to be very effective at this. Also good at getting gum off my dashboard. Not that we have that issue.

Once you have sealed all the strips of dough around the filling,

Take a thin metal spatula and cut the filled dough logs to fit just about the length of the spatula.

Gently ease the spatula under the bar to transfer it to a baking sheet. Oven should be pre-heated to 375 degrees.

Flip the bar so it's seam side down on an ungreased heavy baking sheet. Leave about an inch of space between bars. Keep the bars as long as possible when baking. Bake 10-12 minutes.

When still hot, cut with a sharp knife into cookie size bars.

Transfer to a cooling rack if desired.

When cooled, place in an air tight container or wrap tightly in individual snack baggies.

There you go. Homemade fig bars.

Chocolate Butter Cookies

After yesterday's post on Evil Italian Butter Cookies, I had some serious reflection on the fact that I would love to see a chocolate version of the delicate piped cookie. So, we set to work here and altered just a few ingredients on the original version by Joanne. Here's what we came up with for that chocolate version. I hope you enjoy them as much as we have.

My Chocolate Butter Cookies

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup shortening (Spectrum makes a nice organic shortening...)

1/2 cups granulated sugar, pulsed 2 minutes in a spice or coffee grinder

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/4 cup cornstarch

1/3 cup baking cocoa

2 tsp LorAnn buttery sweet dough emulsion

1/3 cup egg yolks

Directions:

Cream together the softened butter, shortening, sugar, emulsion and egg yolks until very light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Sift the flour, cornstarch and cocoa through a sifter and add to the cream mixture. Stir well. Pre heat oven to 375 degrees. Place parchment paper on a cookie sheet and pipe the cookie batter through a very large star tip in a 2 inch circle or in a zig-zag design, leaving one inch between cookies. Bake 10-12 minutes. Allow to cool on sheet pan and then decorate as desired. We added chocolate chips to some. Others we dusted with a rose petal and orange-vanilla infused sugar. Both where heavenly.

Once cool, store in an air tight container. Anyone want to come take some of these off my hands? They are staring at me right now and I don't know how much longer I can stay on my diet. EEEEK! What was I thinking adding chocolate to the already evil butter cookies?!
Oh yes...if you think of it, go check out our Upcoming Giveaway! You know you want a Paula Deen cast iron covered casserole (it's amazing)!

There you go.

New York Bakery-Style Italian Butter Cookies

I love the Evil Think Tank (ETT), as we have come to call it around here. It's where the chef goes with other chefs to think of the most evil thing possible to bake or cook...and then blog it. Only a very few have dared come visit my think tank. I've said for years that Food Network should have a show where chefs have to come together like this. Random teams...one purpose, and they all have to agree. It would be crazy to see all those passionate personalities have to come to real terms. You know? At any rate...last week, I had a fun long-distance ETT with a gal named Joanne Galatolo Nunziante. Now, aside from her name sounding like a very expensive pair of shoes...I have come to enjoy our little chats on various baking subjects. Her painted decorative bread is taking on a genius level of practical application. Something she tells me she learned from my blog. So, when she wrote about a certain cookie, I was excited to delve into a full-out think tank with her....over a long distance. In all honesty, I supplied a couple of recipes, and she and her sister did a lot of leg work in the kitchen. I'm told that big sister Palma still calls her "JoDough". That's Joanne on the left, and Palma on the right.

Joanne wrote:

"Hi Stephanie,

I hope this is okay...I have a baking question. My sister and I have been on a long quest to find a recipe for certain Italian bakery cookies we used to get growing up in Brooklyn. They seem to call them butter cookies, although they really don't taste buttery. The unique thing about them is their texture which is SANDY! They are generally piped through a star tip in round shapes and sometimes dipped in chocolate or with sprinkles.
We've tried a couple of recipes but they just don't have that sandy texture. Do you happen to know what they might use to achieve this texture? We are desperate. lol. Goin' nuts here. Any suggestions greatly appreciated. Thanks :)

In an effort to get my head wrapped around what she wanted exactly, I suggested a few nut cookie recipes, a couple cornmeal ones...wanting to be sure that we were on the same page.

Joanne wrote back:

"My goodness...You are such a dear! I so appreciate your willingness to help. :)
Your suggestions make perfect sense, although I don't think they lead to this particular cookie. I know they're not pignoli's which are chewy and almondy. Doesn't taste at all or have any evidence of nuts in them. They're generally very pale in color too. Cornmeal?...ummm...I dunno, maybe, but not a dense dough...more powdery I think. They don't taste polenta-y. lol Sheesh. I wish I could better explain the texture. They don't feel greasy...they're rather dry and crumbly like sand held together (they make alotta crumbzzz!), and I suspect some shortening is used rather than butter. Not a whole lotta distinct flavor, except maybe from some vanilla (makes you wonder why we even want them lol)
All the Italian pastry shops & bakeries make them in NY.

The thing that bugs me most I think, is that you can pretty much find ANY recipe on the Internet, but these somehow are very elusive...almost like they're TOP SECRET! LOL! Is there a resource for bakery recipes????

So...I sent her this recipe:

Italian Butter Tea Cookies

adapted from the CIA Professional Baking book:

6 oz butter
6 oz shortening
6 oz granulated sugar
3 oz powdered sugar
4.5 oz egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 lb cake flour
2 oz cornstarch

Creaming method. Pipe through a bag, quarter-size cookies and bake 375 degrees for 10 minutes.

Here's the final recipe we came up with.

Italian Butter (AKA Sand) COOKIES

2 cups flour (we used AP)
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup butter
1 1/4 cups confectioners sugar *
1 1/2 t. vanilla extract
2 eggs
*(we also liked 3/4 c. conf sugar & 1/4 c. granulated which made them a slight bit sweeter)

Creaming method. Put through the bag with a large star tip. Bake at 375 F for 12-15 minutes or until lightly brown. Decorate with choc chips, sprinkles or leave plain and dip half in melted choc., etc."

The chocolate-dipped ones are the ones I made:

I made the cookies, too. One I made with my butter cookie recipe and one I made with her recipe. 

Final Note: It helps immensely to increase the flour a bit for a better hold on the cookies. I have found in Arizona, that  I have better results with 2 cups flour and 1/3 cup cornstarch instead of what is on the current recipe. 



I have to say, the Sand cookies were so delicate and delicious. I'm so glad Joanne has been so good about including me in her quest...and let's face it, what's not to love about that? Thank you, Joanne Galatolo Nunziante, and Kudos to her big sister, Palma, for the use of her kitchen and her perseverance in the development of the recipe. After all, the quest for the sand cookie recipe was for Palma...It's her fave. I've never met them, but I count them as evil genius kindred spirits. Thank you ladies!

There you go. Make something evil, like a sand cookie. There's no sand in there...just pure evil goodness.

Always My Very Best,
Your Friend Chef Tess