Black Tea Infused Bourbon Chocolate Chip Cookies

I'm constantly trying recipes by one of my favorite food bloggers, A cozy kitchen. I LOVE cookies and I LOVE bourbon so when I saw her recipe for bourbon chocolate chip and pecan cookies I knew I had to try it and had to find a way to incorporate tea into it!

One of the easiest ways I've found to incorporate tea into cookie recipes is if they have butter or milk in them! This recipe calls for melted butter (yasss!) so when you melt it for the recipe, you can just throw some tea in it to infuse the butter and strain it before using it in the recipe. For this recipe I used some black tea from Heirloom Tea Company that came in my Sips by box :)

There are a few glorious things about this recipe. First, it combines some of my favorite things including bourbon, chocolate chips and pecans! I used bittersweet chocolate chips and it's such a great bite of flavor with the nuts. 

Second, I didn't mention this in the recipe but you'll see some salt flakes in my photos and also on the original recipe linked above. The salt flakes were something in the original recipe and I baked these cookies twice using the flakes and not using the flakes. If you are the type of person who like sea salt + sweets, USE THE FLAKES! SO GOOD!

Finally, I want to give credit to A Cozy Kitchen for solving the cookie crisis. The cookie crisis (to me at least) is always wanting cookies but never wanted to bake one or two dozen. In her post she talks about her process which is making this batch, cooking what she wants and freezing the rest. She scoops the dough and places them in the freezer and anytime you want one or maybe two cookies you can just pull that many balls of dough out and enjoy! This was an amazing hack but also super dangerous for a cookie monster like me. Enjoy!

Blood Orange Smoothie Madeleines

New and improved! 

A while ago I saw a recipe for madeleines from one of my favorite food bloggers, A cozy Kitchen. I worked from this recipe to create madeleines that were tea infused but they were a bit of a mess, especially since I didn't have the proper pan!

I received some blood orange smoothie tea from The Tea Spot in my recent Sipsby box and knew that was the best tea to use! This blend has red rooibos tea, orange peel, hibiscus, rosehips, safflowers, rose petals, natural orange & vanilla flavors. 

In A Cozy Kitchen's recipe she uses "browned butter" which you can read a bit more about in her post. Instead, I used the normal infusing method of melting the butter and throwing the tea in here. You want to add the melted butter to your batter before it congeals!

One of the tweaks I made was to add the zest of lemon to the recipe as well. I think lemon paired well with the other ingredients like rosehip and hibiscous. 

You do want to let the batter cool slightly before putting it into a piping bag! If you use a bag that's fine but you can also just use a ziploc bag with the tip cut off. This makes it easier to fill the molds on the pan. One lesson I learned: even if you have a non stick pan, use either butter or flour or both on the pan before putting the batter in. 

My pan was non stick but it was a bit difficult to get the madeleines out without breaking them! 

I was really excited about how they turned out! Nice and plump! Remember to touch the madeleines to see if they spring back a bit. You do want them to get a bit golden but not too much so you don't burn the bottoms! 

It's my personal opionion that these taste best warm!

Glaze is totally optional but I wanted to try it and it helped cover up some patches from some of the madeleines I butchered :) I made an orange glaze by simply mixing fresh orange juice and confectioner's sugar! 

OMG. SO. GOOD. If you don't like orange, stay awayyyy! My mom actually called me to tell me how good these were. 

100% will be making again!