How to Make Lavender Shortbread, the Loveliest Holiday Dessert

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It's the holidays, which means you'll probably be eating

and making a lot of cookies.

And the question that we ask ourselves every year

is how do we make this year different?

These lavender shortbread wreaths are special

and pretty different in a couple ways.

And the fun part is that you can actually

decorate them however you want.

The list is literally endless.

Alright, so let's get started.

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So the first thing before we even make the dough

is we're going to make the glaze.

So we have our bowl of powdered sugar,

pretty basic.

And into it, we're going to add a little bit

of cream of tarter.

So I'm going to crack my eggs.

We're going to have three egg whites that go inside.

Ideally you're going to want to let this rest

at least 12 hours, which means make this

the day before you plan on decorating,

but you know, give it a couple hours and you should be okay.

I'm going to whisk the dry ingredients together

before I do anything else.

So I'm going to add sugar and my butter.

I'm going to beat this for a couple minutes

just to make sure that it's light, fluffy,

a little airated.

Opps, I almost forgot.

You add the lavender to the butter and not the dry

because lavender is better infused in fat,

so as you cream it, it sort of perfumes the entire butter.

So you're going to cream your butter and sugar

until it's very pale, light, fluffy, about five minutes.

(mixing bowl sound)

Okay, it's ready.

This is the type of dough that you could make

a month ahead if you wanted,

or two hours ahead, which is how long it needs to chill,

at least.

And when I'm patting dough that I'm going to roll out,

I always try and make it as flat as possible

from the beginning.

Okay, so I'm going to go chill this.

So our dough is chilled.

We're going to roll out on parchment

because it becomes easier to cut out shapes.

Flour both sides.

So now we're going to start rolling.

And you want to put a piece of parchment on top

of the flour dough just to make it much easier.

Periodically it's nice to lift up your parchment,

dust a little bit more.

So now I'm going to cut out my shapes

and because we're making wreaths,

we need the large outside cutter

and also the cute little tiny inside cutter.

And like you're punching out any sort of shape,

you want to come as close together as possible.

So now I'm going to gather up most of the scraps.

So I got most of the scraps kind of cleaned up.

And now I'm going to go around and cut out my tiny piece.

We're going to re-roll them so we can make more wreaths.

You just want to give them a little breathing room

because they might puff slightly

but you can put quite a few on the sheet tray

at the same time.

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This is our favorite time.

Our cookies are cooled, we have all of our decorations.

We have our glaze that we made yesterday.

It's time to decorate.

Freeze-dried fruits.

We've got blueberries, raspberries, cranberries,

dried flowers, candied rose petals, and violet, and mint.

Chopped pistachios.

And some sugared rosemary leaves.

We're going to now decorate our cookies

which is basically as easy as taking your cooled cookies,

dipping them face down into your glaze,

and if it's a little lumpy at first it's fine,

it's going to smooth itself out.

And, you know, you can really do whatever you want,

which is kind of fun.

When I said you can put anything on that you want,

I meant within reason.

And you want to do things that also taste good

and what they're doing, is that they're adding obviously,

they're making them look really fun to eat

but they're doing new a textural thing or two.

So there you have it, our lavender shortbread wreaths.

And you can find the recipe at bonappetit.com/holidays.

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