Lemon Rooibos Shortbread
February 24, 2012 at 4:00:00 PMby Kim Walker

My laptop is resting on the kitchen counter while I compose this blog entry, but I keep . . .getting. . . distracted . . . by a smell. It's entirely pleasant, kind of sweet and earthy and tropical. Coconut! And something else, a back note that anchors it and keeps it from being too sweet. I look around at the overripe bananas and Todd's coffee and then spot it. It's the loose green tea I had poured out in a little pile so I could photograph it for you. The blend's called Lime in the Coconut, and it was one of a trio of teas Ani at California Tea House sent to me to sample. Here it is:

It has little flecks of coconut and is tossed with lime juice to give it that wonderful fragrance. The tea in the background is a rooibos blend called Tiramisu, and I used the Lemon Meringue Pie blend for the cookies in the top photo; it's a rooibos blend with lemongrass and vanilla.

To make the shortbread cookies, I ground 1 tablespoon of the Lemon Meringue Pie rooibos in my mini food processor (You could use any kind of rooibos, or any tea for that matter; the original recipe uses Earl Grey.) I mixed the tea with 1 cup flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 6 tablespoons confectioners' sugar (1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons). I added 1 teaspoon each vanilla and grated lemon peel. Next I cut up 1/2 cup (1 stick) cold butter into small pieces. I tossed the pieces with the flour mixture, then used my hand mixer to beat the butter into the flour. I stopped when the mixture looked like wet sand with tiny pebbles of unmixed butter throughout. (I've never seen this method used anywhere and I just made it up on the spot, but it seemed to work for me. Just don't beat it too much; you want some butter still visible.)

I put the mixture in a ziptop bag and then formed into a log (about 9 inches or so). I decided to make triangles; rolling a round log would be more traditional. I put the log in the fridge for about an hour, but I chose the fridge because I thought I might want them to sit longer.

After the dough had time to chill, I sliced it into cookies, about 1/3 inch thick. Laid them out on a cookie shee, then baked in a 375F oven for 10 to 12 minutes, until the cookies begin to brown. Let cool on cookie sheet for a few minutes, then transferred to a cooling rack to cool completely.

These cookies smelled fantastic, and the lemon rooibos really came thorugh. They tasted good, too, but I didn't quite get the tea ground finely enough, so there were bits of tea leaves sticking in our teeth. We enjoyed them anyway. Next time, though, I'll use a coffee grinder to grind the tea. I tried it out and definitely got the tea fine enough with it: