One of the very first recipes from Marbled, Swirled, and Layered that I added to my to-bake list was Irvin Lin's "Jumbo Arnold Palmer Cookies." The cookbook photo definitely caught my eye, but I also loved the idea of a black tea-lemon cookie. I rarely drink Arnold Palmers but I drink a lot of iced tea with lemon. I even have a particular affinity for Lipton Yellow Label tea -- the variety specified in the recipe -- even though I know it's not exactly high-quality tea. But when I was growing up we drank iced tea made from Lipton instant mix and the flavor has always stayed with me, the same way that I still love
Cool Whip, Wonder Bread, and the Hi-C orange drink at McDonalds (which is sadly being phased out). And if nothing else, Lipton Tea is always consistent.
These cookies have a lemonade cookie dough combined with an iced tea cookie dough, topped with both lemon glaze and tea glaze. The doughs are not merely the same base recipe with either lemon or tea added. The lemonade dough includes butter, sugar, lemon zest, lemon extract, baking powder, baking soda, salt, egg, and all-purpose flour. The iced tea dough is made from butter, dark brown sugar, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, egg, ground Lipton tea (poured out from tea bags and run through a spice grinder), all-purpose flour, and whole-wheat flour.
You can bake the cookies immediately without needing to chill or rest the doughs. The recipe instructs you to pinch off a chunk off each dough about the size of a walnut (35 grams), squish them together, roll the dough into a ball, and flatten each cookie before baking. I used a #50 scoop (which was my approximation of "walnut size') to portion out the doughs, and each scoop weighed only 22 grams. Since I made my cookies smaller than specified, I was not surprised when I got 31 cookies from each batch even though the recipe specifies a yield of 18. However, my cookies still ended up quite large; they were four inches in diameter, and I could barely fit eight cookies on a large baking sheet. Lin's "jumbo" cookies must be ginormous.
The lemon glaze is a mixture of powdered sugar and lemon juice; the tea glaze is powdered sugar mixed with very strong brewed Lipton tea. The recipe produces twice as much lemon glaze as tea glaze and you are supposed to spread lemon glaze on each cookie, drizzle on some tea glaze, and swirl the two together. I put the tea glaze in a squeeze bottle to make it easier to drizzle and you can see in the photo above that I experimented with different glaze designs. I ran out of lemon glaze part way through and had to mix up some more to cover all of the cookies.
I left the glazed cookies out overnight to dry. Much to my consternation, the glaze was not fully set the following morning. I packed the cookies in a plastic container to take to work and while some cookies arrived with the glaze just smudged or slightly askew, other cookies had lost chunks of glaze that became stuck to the bottom of the cookies stacked on top of them.
Still, these cookies were really good. I thought that the lemon portion of the cookie was definitely the better half -- the lemon flavor was bright and clear. The flavor of the iced-tea portion of the cookie was a little muddier, and I suspect it might be challenging to identify if you didn't know there was tea in the cookie. I thought the lemon glaze was too sweet, but the tea glaze was lovely (although almost impossible to taste clearly apart from the lemon glaze). Because the cookies were so large and were basically split down the middle between the two flavors, most bites were either all lemon or all tea -- which is why this cookie didn't strictly read like an Arnold Palmer to me, since it didn't actually combine the two flavors in each bite.
Still, I would make this cookie again -- either as written, or just as a lemon cookie with only the lemonade dough. My tasters really enjoyed them and so did I!
Recipe: "Jumbo Arnold Palmer Cookies" from Marbled, Swirled, and Layered by Irvin Lin.
Previous Posts:
These cookies have a lemonade cookie dough combined with an iced tea cookie dough, topped with both lemon glaze and tea glaze. The doughs are not merely the same base recipe with either lemon or tea added. The lemonade dough includes butter, sugar, lemon zest, lemon extract, baking powder, baking soda, salt, egg, and all-purpose flour. The iced tea dough is made from butter, dark brown sugar, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, egg, ground Lipton tea (poured out from tea bags and run through a spice grinder), all-purpose flour, and whole-wheat flour.
You can bake the cookies immediately without needing to chill or rest the doughs. The recipe instructs you to pinch off a chunk off each dough about the size of a walnut (35 grams), squish them together, roll the dough into a ball, and flatten each cookie before baking. I used a #50 scoop (which was my approximation of "walnut size') to portion out the doughs, and each scoop weighed only 22 grams. Since I made my cookies smaller than specified, I was not surprised when I got 31 cookies from each batch even though the recipe specifies a yield of 18. However, my cookies still ended up quite large; they were four inches in diameter, and I could barely fit eight cookies on a large baking sheet. Lin's "jumbo" cookies must be ginormous.
I left the glazed cookies out overnight to dry. Much to my consternation, the glaze was not fully set the following morning. I packed the cookies in a plastic container to take to work and while some cookies arrived with the glaze just smudged or slightly askew, other cookies had lost chunks of glaze that became stuck to the bottom of the cookies stacked on top of them.
Still, these cookies were really good. I thought that the lemon portion of the cookie was definitely the better half -- the lemon flavor was bright and clear. The flavor of the iced-tea portion of the cookie was a little muddier, and I suspect it might be challenging to identify if you didn't know there was tea in the cookie. I thought the lemon glaze was too sweet, but the tea glaze was lovely (although almost impossible to taste clearly apart from the lemon glaze). Because the cookies were so large and were basically split down the middle between the two flavors, most bites were either all lemon or all tea -- which is why this cookie didn't strictly read like an Arnold Palmer to me, since it didn't actually combine the two flavors in each bite.
Still, I would make this cookie again -- either as written, or just as a lemon cookie with only the lemonade dough. My tasters really enjoyed them and so did I!
Recipe: "Jumbo Arnold Palmer Cookies" from Marbled, Swirled, and Layered by Irvin Lin.
Previous Posts:
- "Green Tea Sablés and Holiday Party Recap," December 23, 2014.
- "Lavish Us with Lemon: Sam's Glazed Lavish Lemon Cookies," March 4, 2012.
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