These crisp Lavender Garden Butter Cookies are infused with both lavender salt and lavender sugar and all the butter flavor you expect from a butter cookie recipe.
Lavender Butter Cookies
With rows and rows of lavender growing in my garden, I have found numerous ways to indulge in both their scent and flavor.
Having dried the purple flowers in the autumn, I have jars of dried flowers to use throughout the year.
A dear friend gave me a gift of lavender sugar and lavender salt and I knew a butter rich cookie was exactly what would showcase the flavor of the lavender. It did!
Butter Cookies
Sure, sure, sure we can make cookies with a variety of fats to develop the taste and texture of numerous favored cookies but we all know a butter cookie is just plain ole ‘old fashion’ and the way cookies have always been made.
There’s a reason for that, they are always scrumptious.
What Butter To Use In Butter Cookies?
Most often I will use unsalted butter when baking.
Not that I don’t want salt in the recipe because I know that salt makes sweet, sweeter. I simply prefer to use the amount of salt and the type of salt I choose to use for the recipe.
If I have a hankering for homemade cookies and all I have in the fridge is salted butter, I simply don’t add additional salt to the cookie dough.
How To Quickly Soften Butter For Cookie Recipes
There I was, wanting to make cookies and only a very short time to get it done.
The butter in the fridge was too hard for making a dough and melting it just isn’t an option. Here’s a trick I use that works fast: Take a glass jar, like a mason jar with a lid.
Fill the glass jar with hot water, put the lid on and let it sit a minute or two.
Pour the water out and pop the butter, paper and all, into the jar and put the lid on. Within minutes the butter is perfectly soft to make cookies!
Lavender Salt And Lavender Sugar
Since I created this recipe around a gift I was given of lavender salt and lavender sugar already mixed, that is what I used in this recipe.
It is just as easy to make a small batch of both yourself.
Get ahold of some freshly picked lavender, put half in a little jar of salt, the rest in a little jar of sugar and with the back of a small spoon, bruise the flower buds and press them into the grains of salt or sugar.
Place an airtight lid on the jar and put them right there with your other spices. Ready when you are!
Crisp Butter Cookie Recipe
There’s a few quick tricks I use when making cookies that I want to have a bit of a crunch to them.
First is to leave them in the oven after they are finished baking, oven off and door ajar, for just a few more minutes, which helps to dehydrate the cookie a little without cooking it to a burnt crisp.
Second is to use a sanding sugar. What’s that?
Sanding sugar is a larger crystal sugar than the granulated sugar going into the cookie dough.
It comes in many colors, and in the case of my lavender cookies, the lavender sugar was a large crystal sugar, perfect to use as a sanding sugar.
Or Make your own, as the instructions are in the recipe!
Once the dough has been rolled into a log and chilled for an hour, unwrap the log and roll it in the sugar to give a nice crunch to the edges of the cookie.
Ingredients Needed
- Butter
- Mascarpone
- Sugar
- Lavender sugar – store bought or can macerate lavender buds with sugar and sit overnight
- Egg yolks
- Flour
- Lavender salt – store bought or can macerate lavender buds with salt and sit overnight
Equipment Needed
- Food processor or hand mixer and a mixing bowl
- Measuring cup
- Measuring spoons
- Cookie sheet
- Spatula
- Parchment paper
- Knife
- Refrigerator
- Oven
Other Lavender Recipes To Love
Since I grow lavender in my garden, each year that it returns, inspires new recipes for cooking with lavender.
Certainly, I use the leaves and flowers in my bath salts, and many a dried sprig ends up in my clothing drawers, but cooking with lavender is new for me.
- Garden Lavender Blueberry Frozen Fruit Popsicles – with homemade almond milk and sweetened with the nectar of the bees.
- Lavender and Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins – tropical freshness and nutritional nutty flavor of poppy seeds in this perfect dairy free muffin.
Lavender Garden Butter Cookie Recipe
Equipment
- Cookie sheet
- Parchment paper
Ingredients
- 12 oz Butter softened
- 4 oz Mascarpone softened
- 1/3 cup Sugar
- 2 Egg yolks
- 2 cups Flour
- 1/2 tsp Lavender salt buds crushed into salt
- 1 tbsp Lavender buds rough chopped
- Lavender Sugar
- 1/4 cup Large Crystal Sugar
- 3 tbsp Lavender buds rough chopped
Instructions
- Place the softened butter, mascarpone, sugar and the egg yolks into a bowl and whisk them until lighter in color and creamy.
- Sprinkle flour, buds and salt into the butter mixture while gently whisking.
- The dough will look a little crumbly, as it should. Transfer the mixture to a sheet of parchment paper and mold it with your hands into a log. Use the paper to gently roll the dough into a smooth log. iChill for 30-minutes.
- Preheat oven to 350Unwrap the chilled dough, sprinkle the lavender sugar across the top, roll the log back and forth while sprinkling more sugar.
- Use a sharp knife to cut the dough into slices of even thickness.
- Place cookies on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake at 350 for 12-minutes or until the edge has just begun to turn golden.
- Turn the oven off, open the oven door and leave cookies there for a minute or two more. Cool and enjoy!
I believe the table... that place that draws people to gather, is the most powerful symbol of togetherness. All that happens before the table is set, the planning, the gathering, the preparing, are all an intricate part of the dance that create the mood of celebration to share with friends and loved ones.