Old Fashioned Tea Cookies

1 cup organic butter
1 cup organic turbinado sugar
2 large eggs
2 1/2 cups organic whole wheat stone ground pastry flour
2 generous teaspoons baking powder
1 generous teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup organic milk (more or less)

These are wonderful cookie/cakes which go unbelievably well with tea. They remind us of freshly baked vanilla wafers, before the recipe for vanilla wafers was changed and fixed up so they could sit on the grocery shelf for a year or more without going rancid. These cake/cookies are delicate, light, cake-like with a wonderful taste whether warm out of the oven or at room temperature.

Put butter in your electric mixer and beat a few minutes until it becomes creamy. Add sugar, a little at a time, beating until the combination is creamy and light. Add eggs and beat a few minutes to blend the mixture.

Mix flour, baking power and cinnamon in a bowl using a spoon to lift up the flour and pour it back into the bowl – letting lots of air into this dry mixture.

Add half the flour mix to the electric mixer, which is now turned to low, add the milk and the remaining flour while mixing the cookie dough. Be careful to mix only to combine the ingredients, don’t mix too much because you will get a tough cookie.

Put the cookie dough into the refrigerator for an hour or more. This is a cookie dough you can keep in the refrigerator, taking a bit out as you are ready to have freshly baked cookies.

Butter a baking pan by making circles with the butter where you are going to put a cookie.

Using a teaspoon, take up a spoon full of the mixture, roll it into a ball in your hand and put the ball where you have made a circle on the baking pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 13-15 minutes. When you take these out of the oven, immediately release the cookies from the baking pan using a spatula to lift them from the pan. Put the cookies back in their place on the baking pan to cool a few minutes. When cool enough not to stick together or to stick to the plate in which you are going to put them, transfer the cookies to a serving plate. Take the cookies you would like off the plate before you serve them because they won’t last – it is hard to eat only four or five and impossible to eat only one.

4/16/2010 an email from a blog reader follows
Thanks for the tea cookies recipe. They are wonderful – they taste like fresh vanilla wafers. The ones you buy at the store in various boxes from different manufacturers are hard and stale. We are so used to them we have collectively forgotten why vanilla wafers were so popular.

I put a pecan into the top of the cookies before I baked them and it made a world of difference. The taste was barely modified with the pecan, but they looked much more elegant. I am sure other things pushed gently into the top of these cookies before they bake would also be great – depending upon the taste of the baker. Keep those recipe’s coming. I love being a part of the Bettina Network’s bed & breakfast community even though I only travel once or twice a year I read your blog religiously.

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