I made these a while back ago, but they seemed to pretty well-received so I thought they'd make good Christmas presents too. You can jazz it up and use strings in festive colours to tie the cookies up with, so they really look like tea bags. I made these with Earl Grey Tea leaves, but these would work well with any type of strongly flavoured, loose tea (I recommend black teas over any others because the smokiness really goes well with the shortbread)
Nothing goes better with tea biscuits than actual tea.
Ingredients
- 3 tbsp Earl Grey tea leaves (either get loose ones, or just open up an actual tea bag!)
- 2.5 cups all-purpose flour (Weizenmehl)
- 1 cup butter, softened to room temperature
- 0.5 cup caster sugar (finely milled white sugar)
- 1 egg yolk
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 pack vanilla sugar (or 1-2 tsp vanilla extract)
- Bittersweet chocolate, 100g (optional)
- Some sort of string
Method
- Cream butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy, then mix in tea leaves
- Mix egg yolk into wet batter.
- Add rest of the dry ingredients (flour, salt) into the wet batter and mix until it comes together to form a smooth biscuit dough (I recommend using your hands for this)
- Wrap in cling film and leave in fridge to rest for at least an hour (or overnight)
- Roll out dough into approximately the thickness you want for the biscuits (maybe 0.5 cm? )
- If you have a square or triangular cookie cutter, this will be really easy. Just use the cookie cutter and then cut the edges to form a tea bag shape as seen above. If not, you can do what I did and make a template yourself, and cut the biscuits out by hand one by one. (This takes forever, so have patience!)
- Poke a hole in the top of the triangular peak with a chopstick, a toothpick, or whatever you have on hand.
- Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius (fan assisted, if not then 200)
- Bake cookies for 15 minutes, then once done, leave to cool.
- This part is optional, but if you want to dip it in chocolate , then melt the chocolate over low heat with a splash of milk or a tiny dollop of butter, then dip the cookies into the chocolate and leave to cool until it hardens. (I put mine in the fridge to speed things up)
- Tie the string through the hole you made in the biscuits.
And that's it! These are so addictive to munch on, you might be tempted to just keep them all for yourself and enjoy them with a cuppa and a view. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
