I have wanted to make cookies with honey that tasted like honey, but obviously I worried about a lot of things, like would a cutout hold its shape even if I replaced the granulated sugar with a liquid sweetener? The answer is yes, apparently.
These cookies scream honey (and lavender if you are using it). Having munched my way through 3 test batches of these babies, I can honestly say that for the lavender honey cookies, it's best to bake them until the edges are just beginning to brown, whereas I thought the honey rye cookies tasted awesome when they were over-baked and quite coloured, bringing out the nuttiness in the butter and rye flour, and a deep, dark brûléed honey flavour that I quite liked.
They are a little more tender when just baked through, and a little dryer when they are baked to a deeper colour. However you make them, these will work. If you aren't a fan of honey, you can stick with the more traditional sugar cookie dough for cutouts. If you want something with more chocolate and mix-ins, try these toffee chocolate coconut cookies.
P.S. These are the "stencils" I used for the powdered sugar. They are actually Williams-Sonoma Easter Linzer Cookie Cutters available on Amazon. I roughly taped all the gaps with regular scotch tape so that only the Easter shape would get stencilled on as you can see from my pictures.
Honey lavender cookies
Ingredients
- 188 grams (1½ cups) bleached all-purpose flour or half rye flour, half all-purpose flour
- 7.5 mL (1½ teaspoon) dried lavender optional
- 0.625 mL (⅛ teaspoon) Diamond Crystal fine kosher salt
- 115 grams (½ cup) Stirling Creamery unsalted butter
- 113 grams (¼ cups) wild flower honey
Instructions
- In the bowl of a food processor, pulse together the all-purpose flour, the lavender, and the salt.
- Cut up the cold butter into pieces and drop it into the food processor. Pulse to form a fine crumble.
- Add the honey and process just enough to form a dough ball. Transfer to plastic wrap and press out into a disk. Chill for 45 minutes in the fridge.
- Preheat the oven to 325ºF. Roll the dough to ⅛" and cut it out with small 1 ½" cookie cutters or bigger ones. If making buttons, you can use the opening of a small piping tip to make the button holes.
- Transfer to a parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake for about 11–12 minutes until the edges are golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.
- You can stencil on Easter patterns with powdered sugar.
Notes
- For this recipe, I baked with Stirling Creamery Churn 84 unsalted butter
Nutrition
I do my best to bake with the finest ingredients. Stirling Creamery, a Canadian company, has provided the butter for this post.
Joanne B says
This looks lovely. I will make them this weekend for my little niece and nephew. Thanks for all your hard work.
Janice says
Let me know how it goes!
Little note: If you make larger cookies (and not button-sized cutouts), you'll probably get about 2.5 doz
Rose R says
I just discovered your blog about 2 months ago. I was doing a search for examples of monkey cakes for my 1 year old's birthday. I came across your banana cake with the peanut butter and chocolate icings. That was one of the best cakes I have ever made, both in looks and taste. Since then I have been following your blog on my feedly and everything you make looks so scrumptious! My point is that your baking, photographing, and writing are not insignificant for me. Keep up the posts!
Teresa says
Those cookies are awfully pretty. It's hard to understand why some people hit it big with seemingly little effort and others work very hard for much less recognition. Worrying isn't a burden that's been given out equally, either. I worry that my hybrid way of blogging doesn't resonate with people, but it's such a good creative outlet for me that I try to let it go. Your blog is lovely and useful, so I hope you can worry less about your impact and enjoy your results more.
Shareba says
I think it's normal to worry about what we do as bloggers. There are so many people writing about the same things, creating the same recipes, doing pretty much the same work. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. It's not like that many people are reading my stuff anyhow!!
That being said - I'd be really sad if you ever stopped blogging. And you'd probably start getting emails from me asking for recipes 🙂