My 10-week stint with the Ministry of Trade and Industry ended last Thursday and I planned ahead to bake some cookies for my colleagues (this sounds like a word for old, working adults...) as a nice, parting gift. It's been a good ten weeks, albeit short but fulfilling nonetheless. I didn't have any expectations prior to starting this internship but I'm glad I took it on. It offered me an insight in the corporate communications industry and of course, the experience in the government sector is something that cannot be learnt in our seminar rooms.
While I enjoyed the ten weeks in my cubicle on level 4 of The Treasury, I've missed the flexibility of my timings, the freedom of being able to shift things around to maximise my time. What I disliked the most about the daily grind of 8 to 5 would be having to squeeze in time to work out, to head to the movies, to go for meetings, to meet my friends, to bake, to rest. Yet again, I yearned for more than 24 hours in a day.
Anyway, so after a few clicks and closing a few tabs, I settled on Earl Grey Biscuits that were rather easy to make, and not so time-consuming (so important, seeing that I only had a few hours after dinner to work the oven into a hot sweat).
I adapted the recipe from A Better Happier St Sebastian, but they were Earl Grey Cookie Sandwiches instead -- with lemon buttercream. I didn't have the time to whip up the buttercream so I went ahead with plain ol' tea biscuits.
EARL-GREY BISCUITS
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
7 bags earl grey tea leaves
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon water
Using a food processor or a blender, pulse the flour, sugars, salt and tea leaves until tea leaves are completely mixed. Add butter, lemon juice and water. Pulse to combine until a dough forms.
Divide the dough in half and form into a round, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 375° and prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Roll out dough and cut out using a cookie cutter or jar, taking car to re-roll the extra dough until it's all used.
Place the cookies on the parchment and bake for 14-16 minutes until the edges have browned.
Adapted from A Better Happier St Sebastian
I don't have a food processor at home (note-to-self: I should get one!) so I used my trusty blender (remember to clean it out and dry it thoroughly) instead. I turned it up to high speed to replace the pulsing of the food processor. A stand mixer won't work in this case because the flour splatters all over and this reduces the accuracy of your measurements.
I would also reduce the amount of butter used because the biscuits turned out a little greasier than I would prefer it to be.
One thing I didn't really like about the dough was how crumbly it was. I was so skeptical when I was cutting the dough because I needed the spatula to slide it off the board onto the baking sheet or else it might just break and crumble. No amount of butter will make it any stickier and that worried me.
I have a lingering fear of baking biscuits because I'm always afraid of the dough expanding out under heat in the oven. But thank goodness this (very tasty) dough didn't expand and combine into one humongous cookie. That would have been disastrous.
So I received a lot of positive feedback and would definitely bookmark this recipe! The crumbliness was just an unnecessary worry because it turned out just nice.
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