| L'amour, toujours l'amour. Love, always
love, and sometimes love inspires us to come into the
kitchen. A friend of mine, caterer Lindsey Shaw, makes
the most delicious heart- shaped cookies out of shortbread,
and a little bit of love. Lindsey shares her delicious
recipes with you.
SHORTBREAD HEART-SHAPED COOKIES:
Ingredients:
- 3 cups sifted white flour
- Pinch of salt
- ¾ lb unsalted butter
- 1 cup icing sugar
- Lavender
- Lemon
- **optional – crystallized ginger, cardamom,
rosemary, orange rinds, thyme, cut- up edible petals
- Good-quality chocolate
- Jam
- Edible gold leaf
Method:
Add flour, salt, butter, and icing sugar into a mixer,
then mix it up. Add some lavender and lemon. Feel free
to experiment with other spices, such as ginger, cardamom,
rosemary, orange rinds, thyme, or cut-up edible petals.
Mix for 5 to 10 minutes, so that it becomes crumbly, like
oatmeal. Bind it together and refrigerate it; overnight
is best, as it needs to be really cold. Then, remove from
refrigerator, and roll it out onto a cutting board, using
flour.
Using cookie cutters, cut out different shapes, such as
circles, flowers, squares or hearts.
Bake them at 325 degrees for 3 to 8 minutes, making sure
they’re cooked through but not overdone.
Melt chocolate, and drizzle over cookies with a squeeze
bottle.
As an option, you can make little indentations in some
of the cookies and fill them with jam. For the circle
cookies, you can dip them halfway in chocolate and then
put some edible gold leaf on them. Sprinkle the hearts
with icing sugar.
For a nice presentation, try packaging them up in red
and white cellophane with a card that details a list
of the types of cookies inside. You can even give a
batch of dough as a gift, with some cookie cutters and
a card, which says something like, “All you’ve
got to do is roll it out and know how much I love you”.
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