The best thing about summer holidays is… having time to experiment with cookie recipes. Me, a cookie nerd?! Yes. Definitely. I hope you don’t mind.
This recipe is inspired by T by Daniel’s scrumdilious tea flavour, Apple Strudel. I recently discovered the amazing array of loose leaf teas in T by Daniel’s shop and am so thankful to them for sharing a few of their tea selections with me. If you read my Matcha Sugar Cookie post, you’ll already know how excited I am to try more enticing flavours, such as Banana Popsicle and Watch That Mango.
If you’d like to make these too and perhaps decorated a variety of fruit cookies, here’s what you’ll need:
Apple Strudel Tea
The apple strudel tea I used is from T by Daniel and can be found here.
Recipe Notes
*I’ve put the recipe notes and photos ahead of the recipe, as they are sometimes missed if share below the recipe.
I prefer the tea in powder format for this recipe – It’s easier to cut the cookie shapes out and disperses the flavour more evenly. To grind the tea leaves up, you could use a mortar and pestle (pictured in the top left above), a food processor, or a powerful blender. I used my blendtec blender and small twister jar, which made the grinding quick and easy.
Ty by Daniel’s Apple Strudel tea is in the green tea family so has a slightly green tinge to it.
The dough is a variation of my sugar cookie recipe, which can be found here. You can add more or less apple strudel tea to the dough, depending on your taste.
Apple Strudel Tea Cookie Recipe
Apple Strudel Tea Cut Out Cookie Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 cups unsalted butter, room temperature
- 2 cups granulated sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 5 cups all-purpose flour
- 4 tsp apple strudel loose leaf powder, ground add more or less, to your taste
- 1 tsp baking powder *omit if you don't want your cookies to spread
- 1 tsp salt
Instructions
- Cream the butter and sugar together in the bowl of an electric mixer on low to medium speed. (Use the paddle attachment). Mix until thoroughly incorporated – for about one minute. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a plastic spatula and mix again for a few seconds more. Over mixing the butter and sugar in this step will cause too much air to be incorporated into the dough. If you’d like a light and fluffy cookie, that’s ideal, however the dough will spread more during baking; not ideal if you’d like the cookie to hold its shape.
- Add eggs slowly and mix. Add vanilla extract and mix. Scrape down the bowl with your spatula at least once and mix briefly again.
- Sift your dry ingredients together. (Flour, apple strudel tea powder and salt. I do not use baking powder in my sugar cookies).
- Add all of the flour mixture to the bowl. Place a large tea towel or two small tea towels between the edge of the bowl and the electric mixer so that the flour won’t escape. Mix on low speed for 3o seconds. Remove the tea towels and observe the dough mixing; when it clumps around the paddle attachment it’s ready. It’s also important at this stage not to over mix the dough (the glutens in the flour develop and the dough can become tough).
- Roll the dough out between 2 large pieces of parchment paper. Place on a baking sheet and into the fridge for a minimum of 1 hour.
- Roll out the dough further if you need to, and cut out cookie shapes. Place on parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Re-roll scraps and repeat.
- Put cookie dough shapes back into the fridge for 10 minutes to 1 hour to chill again. They will then hold their shape better when baked.
- Preheat your oven to 350°F or 176°C.
- Bake cookies for 8-12 minutes or until the edges become golden brown. The baking time will depend on the size of your cookie.
- Let cookies cool to room temperature and decorate!
Notes
Cookie Cutters
I bought the apple cutter, as well as the other fruit cookie cutters (from a set), from How Sweet Is That?’s shop here.
It was in fact the packaging of the cutter set which inspired me to have a little fun adding a few cute, kawaii faces here and there.
Royal Icing
You can find my favorite royal icing recipe here. The consistency of icing is key for easy decorating. Click here to see a YouTube video on finding the right icing thickness.
Decorating Items
What you’ll need:
- Piping Tips #’s 1.5, 2, 3, leaf tip 65
- Piping Bags
- Couplers
- Gel paste colors
Decorating Steps
This video on outlining and flooding is a good place to start if you’re new to decorating cookies with royal icing. These cookie decorating basics YouTube videos may also be helpful to get you started.
If you have some cookie decorating experience you’ll see that these cookies are simple in technique to make, so I won’t share a step by step process here. Please feel free to ask me any questions in the comment section.
I’ve shared a few how-to videos on Instagram though, which you can see here.
If you have any questions or comments please feel free to drop me a line below in the comment section or on social media. You can find me on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube.
Happy baking and decorating!
xo,
Marian
Hi Marian,
Gorgeous colorfull fruit cookies.
Love the way you decorate each and every one. I admire your talents, thank you for all your super idea’s and sharing them with us!
ML
Oh Marian, you know how much I love fruit!!
I adore these cuties!! I bet they taste delicious, who doesn’t love “Apfelstrudel”? 🙂
I love the colors, so bright and “happy”.
The pineapple and watermelons are my favorites 🙂
Thanks for sharing this recipe with all cookie lovers <3
xoxo,
niner
No se inglés pero quiero aprender gracias
Such cute cookies!!! And I love the videos on Instagram–what seems super simple for you is sometimes a challenge for me :). How did you do the cut apple slice? It’s adorable and I love that it has less red icing. Thanks for all your work!!!
Thanks Kathy!
For the apple slice, I outlined in red first… doing some areas a little thicker and some thinner, and did the center line. I added the white immediately, and the little black seed dots right on top of the wet white. To make the seeds have a pointy end, you can drag a toothpick through one end (much like I’ve done on the watermelon seeds on Instagram). Add the thick icing for the green leaf and that’s it! Hope that helps, and happy decorating!