Earl Grey Shortbread Recipe
‘Tis the season! We are seriously behind on the posts here but only because we’ve been slammed with gatherings with friends and family. Every year, we always try to give our friends and family something small over the holidays whether it be a simple greeting card or some baked goods. This year, we fell behind and only did greeting cards but later on in the month, we got an itch to make Earl Grey Shortbread Recipe.
Sure we could’ve made regular Shortbread but I am naturally biased and like anything Earl Grey flavoured 🙂 There weren’t too many recipes out there for Earl Grey Shortbread. I ended up using the Shortbread recipe from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook as the foundation to this recipe. Then, I added in the grounded up Earl Grey tea leaves to further enhance the flavour. The results were these beautiful cookies (thanks to the crimped cookie cutter that I had lying around) speckled with the black tea leaves.
These Earl Grey Shortbreads make great gifts
We ended up packaging these in little cellophane baggies and tied them off with red ribbon to make them look more festive. We gifted them to our friends and they really enjoyed it. Now I’m just kicking myself as to why I didn’t think of this idea earlier…
It really surprised me when I learned that you could put tea leaves into the recipe. At first, I thought I had to steep the tea leaves somewhere and incorporate it into my recipe but all the other recipes I’ve seen just said to incorporate loose tea leaves. I had to grind my loose tea leaves up with a mortar and pestle since my loose tea leaves were pretty large but I think if you had tea bags where the tea leaves are more fine, you won’t have to. They’re small enough that they’re edible.
Give this recipe a try and let us know how it turns out! We did find it tastes better the next day.
If you enjoyed this recipe, you may also enjoy the following Earl Grey recipes:
Earl Grey Shortbread Recipe
Ingredients
- 180g unsalted butter, softened
- 90g granulated sugar
- 2g kosher salt
- 270g all purpose flour
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 3 tbsp earl grey loose tea leaves
- zest from half a lemon
Instructions
- 1. In a stand mixer with paddle attachment, cream together softened butter for about 5 minutes on medium-high speed until light and fluffy. Scrape down sides occasionally to ensure even mixing.
- 2. Add in your sugar and salt and continue mixing on medium-high speed for about 5-7 minutes, scraping down sides occasionally to ensure all sugar and salt is incorporated into the butter mixture.
- 3. Add in vanilla extract and lemon zest.
- 4. If you have loose tea leaves, make sure to ground them up into fine powder using either a mortar and pestle or a food processor before adding to the mixture. If you have earl grey tea bags, you can just cut open the tea bags and dump them into the mixture.
- 5. Finally, add in your all purpose flour in thirds to ensure flour is evenly incorporated into your mixture. Reduce the speed down to low and allow to mix just until all flour is incorporated into the butter. Avoid overmixing.
- 6. Once there are no dry lumps left in your bowl, turn the dough mixture onto some saran wrap and shape it into a large rectangular sheet. You can sandwich the dough between two saran wrap and roll it out with a rolling pin to avoid dough from sticking. Dough should be half inch thick. Then, refrigerate for at least 2 hours to allow dough to set.
- 7. After 2 hours, take the dough from fridge and allow to rest at room temperature for about 5 minutes to allow dough to soften a bit to allow for you to use your cookie cutters to cut out shapes. Once you’ve cut out all the shapes, place them in the on your baking tray lined with parchment paper/silpat and put in fridge to chill for 5 minutes. Dough should be hard before baking.
- 8. Preheat oven to 325F in the meantime. Once ready, bake the shortbread cookies for 17-20 minutes, rotating half way to ensure even baking. Bake until the cookies are slightly golden on the sides. The cookie should not be brown so do not overbake! If you use a convection oven, your baking time may be reduced.
- 9. Allow to chill for 15 minutes before serving. This makes about 40 small (2 inch) cookies.
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