After my conversation last week with Vanessa, I’m on the hunt for an amazing lavender cookie recipe. Not just a sugar cookie with lavender rolled into the dough, which is what I’ve done in the past, but a knock-your-socks-off show-stopper. To that end we tried the “Lavender Cookies with White Chocolate crème fraîche Glaze” recipe in Sarah Kieffer’s 100 Cookies: The Baking Book for Every Kitchen. I have a few notes. When Sarah calls for unsalted butter, she means unsalted butter. We didn’t have enough unsalted butter on hand and so we had to cut our added salt down to a 1/4 teaspoon.
Similarly, crème fraîche is a bear to find in our corner of Colorado. I’ve seen it at The Cheese Importers, and that’s all. So we substituted sour cream. I’m not sure if it was the sour cream, altitude, or extra white chocolate chips I added, but we had to melt the glaze in a sauce pan on low heat, stirring constantly, for about three minutes to melt everything.
My culinary lavender has a few stems mixed in with the buds, perfectly edible, but not pretty for pictures. :/
We enjoyed these cookies even more the day after they were baked. Originally they were very crispy–Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith would have approved. But our family prefers soft and chewy cookies. Letting the glaze settle into the cookies really helped create a texture we enjoyed.
It is a bit of a mess to glaze the cookies. See picture above. Have parchment paper on hand.
Part of the flavor of these cookies comes from food processing the sugar with the culinary lavender. We want to try this trick with our cookie press recipe. We also initially missed a note of lemon with the lavender. However, white chocolate and lavender work really well together. Sometimes I feel there is something ever so slightly cloying about white chocolate, but it worked here with the lavender really well. I’m not sure if lemon would upset the balance, but darling daughter and I feel it’s worth trying.
So to sum up, these were solid cookies that really became something special after a day of setting up. Also, if you are a cookie lover, Sarah’s book is definitely worth the shelf space. So many of her recipes have become our go-tos. And she has a recipe for Neapolitan cookies.
I mean, have you seen a prettier cookie? I need to make those again soon and take better pictures. The problem is they are so delicious they get gobbled up really, really fast. Too fast for pretty photos. Maybe if I make them on the sly… Or the dead of night.
What’s your favorite cookies? Do you have an amazing recipe for lavender cookies? What about a standout recipe for a tried and true favorite? I’d love to know.