Growing up in Chennai, I felt like I could tell time based on when hot drinks were served in our house. The city is famed for its coffee, blended with chicory root and poured into glasses in dramatic foot-long streams, but ours was a tea household. My parents’ Guzzini mugs would come out promptly at 6:30 a.m. and once more at 4 p.m., the time I, with my mandated mug of milk, looked forward to most of all because it meant an accompanying packet of shortbread wasn’t far away. We’d sit together with our basset hound, Droopy, in the orange-tiled backyard, my grandmother too, when she was still alive, drinking our drinks, dunking our biscuits, discussing what dinner might be (the dog’s standing request was chicken gizzards). The combination of spiced milky tea and cookies will always be the taste of home to me. These tea-laced sandwich cookies capture that memory precisely.
Chai is a distinctly Northern Indian term. In Southern India, and particularly in Tamil Nadu, where I’m from, we often call it masala tea. While the mixture of spices used varies among regions, almost every version of masala tea includes ginger and cardamom.
BAKER’S NOTE: It’s best to use finely ground tea from a tea bag here because of how seamlessly it dissolves into the dough. But fancier whole-leaf tea is fine to use as long as you crush it with a mortar and pestle before adding it to the melting butter (this will save you from having strips of tea leaves in your finished cookie).