It seems like lavender is everywhere in recipes at the moment and I have to confess, I’ve been very keen to try a few concoctions of my own with it. When the lovely Karina kindly offered me some that she had, I jumped at the chance and created these delightful cookies.
Ingredients
- 125gm butter
- 2/3 cup caster sugar
- 1 egg
- 2 cups plain flour
- 1/2 cup plain flour (this is extra flour that you may or may not need depending on how wet your dough mix is)
- 2 tsps lavender
- 2 tsps lemon juice
- 10 drops purple food colouring (you can make these without the food colouring but they wind up just looking gritty rather than a lovely purple)
Method
Whip the butter with either a hand mixer or food processor. Add the sugar and continue mixing until they are thoroughly creamed. I like to do this separately, rather than just putting the butter and the sugar in to begin with – I think it creates a lighter final cookie.
Add the egg and beat until well combined.
Divide the mix in two and set one half aside.
Working with one of the batches, add the lemon juice, and one cup of the plain flour and mix together to form a soft dough. You may need to add more flour at this point to make it come together, depending on how old your flour is and the weather conditions when you’re making these. Pat the dough a ball, wrap in cling wrap and set aside.
Wipe your food processor out with some paper towel to get rid of most of the moisture.
Put the lavender in the food processor and whizz until it’s coarsely ground up (or use a bullet blender or mortar and pestle).
Next add the remaining butter/sugar/egg mix, the food colouring and 1 cup of flour to form a soft dough. Again, you may need to add extra flour to get the right consistency here. The dough should be pliable and not sticky. Don’t worry if it seems aggressively purple at this point – it will lighten up as it cooks.
Wrap in cling wrap and set aside for about 15 minutes. Unless it’s the height of summer, I don’t like to refrigerate the dough at this point as it becomes too hard to work with.
The pinwheels are made by rolling both batches of dough out into rectangles, laying one on the other and then rolling them up together to make a log.
Once you have your log, wrap it in your baking paper and then cling wrap and pop it in the fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes and up to 2 weeks. You can literally make a roll of cookie dough once every couple of weeks and slice some rounds off when you want fresh cookies. It’s fantastic!
When you’re ready to bake, cut the log into slices, bearing in mind that the cookies will stay roughly the thickness that you cut them at. Because these use plain flour they don’t tend to rise much at all.
Bake for 10-12 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius on a cookie sheet lined with baking paper.
Cool on a wire rack and enjoy.