Treats: holiday cookies

For the holidays I made a few different cookies, and three of the ones that I’ll lump together are the lavender-mint shortbread, lemon poppy seed shortbread, and mint chocolate-chip cookies I made.

Lavender Mint shortbread

The Lavender Mint Shortbread started out with a recipe from AllRecipes: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Lavender-Shortbread-Cookies/ however I altered it a bit by using sweetener in place of the white sugar, and I used Lavender Mint tea from the Banff Tea Company. (Although I do have a nice bag of culinary lavender that I really need to use too…)

The result – very fragrant, not too sweet, with just a little curious and unexpected taste.  I didn’t grind up the tea at all, so the shortbread is unevenly spotted – but so pretty and light! The dough spread just a tiny bit when baking.

Lemon Poppy seed cookies

Next, I struggled with the measurements from the UK version of AllRecipes for lemon poppy seed shortbread: http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/8909/lemon-poppy-seed-shortbread.aspx and although I triple-checked the conversions, the dough was WAY too gooey, and wasn’t going to hold it’s shape at all for baking. So… I started throwing other things in there. I didn’t have fresh lemon zest, so I put in dried lemon rind instead, and really just kind of went nuts with the whole thing.  The result? AMAZING. These were so delicate and light, with a lovely tangy lemon flavour and just a little bit of cute poppyseed sprinkling.  Hahahaha… of course, this is because I didn’t write down ANY of my adjustments and thus will never be able to replicate the cookie.

Mint Chocolate Chip cookies

Finally I made up the mint chocolate chip cookies from The Idea Room: http://www.theidearoom.net/2012/02/mint-chocolate-chip-cookies.html though I used sweetener instead of sugar and used only mint chocolate chips (one full bag, because who’s going to keep 1/3 of a bag left over?) instead of half and half mint and regular chunks.  The end result was just lightly minty, and not nearly as sweet as I had expected.  They were also LOADED with chocolate chips, which I think totally made up for it, though others wanted more sweetness in the cookie part itself. The dough didn’t spread at all when baking though, so instead of leaving them in scoops (after the first batch) I flattend them out before baking.

NOM!