Baking Bread - Dried Milk vs Fresh Milk

I love the smell of fresh bread. I especially like crusty bread but when I want the loaf to last an entire week, I prefer making a soft bread.
When I make soft bread, I add in milk, butter and honey.

Milk is a tricky ingredient to use in bread making. I noticed that bread recipes usually call for powdered milk and not fresh milk. I always wondered why. After some research, I found that there's an enzyme in milk that affects the gluten and weakens the bonds.
But, if you boiled the milk it should deactivate the enzyme and your bread should be bigger.

I decided to put it to the test. (Sorry I forgot to take pictures of the other bread)
With milk, I found that it can be a hit or a miss. If I didn't boil it enough it can cause the volume to be smaller. But sometimes it also rises to the amount I want but with bigger gaps inside the bread.

For the last couple of loaves, I used dried buttermilk powder. I found that it rises more consistently and the volume of the bread is generally bigger then the bread make with fresh milk.

I chose buttermilk because it was the "dried" version and not the "instant" version.
Instant milk isn't heated as hot so it may or may not have the enzyme still active.
Dried milk may not be available at the grocery stores. You'll usually find instant milk there rather then dried milk. You can find dried milk online or if you're lucky, there's a local baking goods store that carries it.

When I was looking for dried milk, I found Medallion Milk in Canada.
I emailed Medallion to see if they have any local stores that carries their product they informed me that Bulk Barn carries it. I was very lucky to have someone local that carries dried milk and not just instant so I can use it for my breads. Bulk Barn had dried buttermilk or instant skim milk so I grabbed the buttermilk powder.

I found that using buttermilk added a little sour smell but the flavour is wonderful.
I'll definitely be using the buttermilk powder going forth.

Happy baking.

Buttermilk Banana Bread

This is one of those baked goods that's more forgiving and easy to make.
All you need is a bowl and a fork and you can mix this by hand.
It's fast, easy and yummy. And it freezes well.
I use silicon modes to make bit size treats and freeze anything I want to keep for later

Buttermilk Banana Bread

Makes 12 normal size cupcakes

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 40g buttermilk
• 40g vegetable oil
• 1 big banana, mashed
• 105g brown sugar
• 105g all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional, can be replaced by pecans as well)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F and prepare your pans (either parchment paper or oil/flour them)
2. Mash the banana.
3. Add the egg, buttermilk and oil to the banana and mix.
4. In another bowl, sift together the sugar, flour, baking soda and salt and mix.
5. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.
6. Pour into prepared pans. Add nuts to each individual cupcake to guarantee nuts in every bite. 
7. For cupcake size, bake for 20 to 25 mins or until cake tester inserted in the centre comes out clean.
8. Remember to completely cool before you freeze. 

Chocolate Swiss Buttercream Cupcakes

Here's an other new flavour I tested. Chocolate.
Yes, it's weird, I've baked for so long but never tried making a chocolate buttercream before.  It's actually so much easier then the fruity flavour creams I make that I don't understand why I didn't do it earlier.
Worked well on top of vanilla cupcakes but I can see chocolate lovers putting this on top of chocolate cupcakes as well. Double whammy.
I know some people use melted chocolate but I used cocoa powder instead.
The cream was smooth, no powdery clumps and nicely flavoured.

Why I used cocoa powder?

Several reasons:
1. I always have cocoa powder on hand as I use it for the cakes. Chocolate on the other hand, you'll want to buy specifically dark baker chocolate so it's deep in flavour and it has less added sugar.
2. It's bitter so it's great to use to balance the sweetness of the cream so it actually doesn't taste too sweet.
3. Easy to use! No need to slowly use a double boiler to melt the chocolate, wait for it to be the perfect temperature before you mix it in etc
All I did after the Swiss Buttercream was finished whipping was scoop in cocoa powder and mix.
4. Easy to adjust flavour. You can easily add more flavour by adding more powder where as if you melt chocolate, if you didn't melt enough, you have to go through the whole process to add more and it's honestly a pain.


Try it out! Easy and pipes very beautifully.

Green Tea Buttercream Cupcakes

I love drinking green tea and eating green tea flavoured food.
So I figured, why not make green tea buttercream?
If you can make it into ice cream, you can definitely make it into buttercream.

So, with my trusty matcha, I added it until I got what I wanted. It reminded me of the ice cream with a different texture.

The wonderful thing about matcha is that it's dried so you don't have to worry about the buttercream breaking due to too much liquid.
It's also bitter so you will not make your cream overly sweet. If anything, it'll help balance the cream out to be less sweet because of the bitterness.
Good matcha is also very strong in flavour. So depending on the cream's batch size, you may only need 2 Tbsp of Matcha.
I used around 2 for enough buttercream for 16 cupcakes.
I usually add a little vanilla extract as well to help enhance the flavours. Vanilla might be a little boring on it's own, but it's a wonderful enhancer and usually adds that little touch to your baking.

I've tried this cream on both vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. Both are wonderful with green tea.
People who have never tried green tea flavour food before like the results.
For the Asian people who love eating green tea ice cream, they couldn't stop eating the cupcakes and went back for seconds.
All in all, I believe that means success.
Next step, bake green tea cupcakes and then put the green tea buttercream on top.
Maybe I'll make it even more Asian and add red bean paste in the middle too.

(It looks much greener under bright lights)

Raspberry Swiss Buttercream on Chocolate Cupcake

It was time to make a new flavour and add it to my collection of buttercream flavours.

I personally love berries so I decided to try to make a raspberry Swiss buttercream.
I used the same method I use for strawberries.
Cook the raspberries down until it's concentrated and mash it up.
The more it's cooked down the better so you remove as much liquid as possible and left with flavour.

Even though the puree is about the same color as the strawberry one, the difference in the buttercream colour is huge.
I've never had such a dark deep beautiful red color before with strawberries.

I also find I have to use more raspberries then I do strawberries when flavouring buttercream.
It seems like out of the 2 berries I've tried so far, strawberry is the strongest flavour so you don't have to use too much of it.

An other difference between the raspberries and strawberries is the number of seeds. For such a tiny berry, there is a ridiculous amount of seeds in it.
Honestly, seeds makes the flavour feel more real but it's a pain to pipe roses as the seeds get stuck in the piping. I also feel like the seeds add more fibre so if possible I would like to keep it in.

My co-workers loved the result. As always, the sweetness is at such a level that people don't feel guilty eating multiple cupcakes so they went back for seconds.
I also asked them about the seed and no one seemed to care if there's seeds vs no seeds.

So my conclusion about this flavour, if requested, I can seed the raspberry puree and use the 1M tip for piping the cupcakes.
If I'm using it within cakes or just a circular tip, then I can leave the seeds in if they do not make a request.

Right now, I take personal orders from friends and family for cakes and cupcakes as I continue to grow the number of flavours I can create on a consistent basis.

One day I'll open up a store ;)

Cranberry, Sunflower seeds and Flax Seed Bread

I've been baking bread from the Bread Bible ever since I got it.
There's so many recipes to try but recently I've been playing around with the basic hearth bread recipe (page 305).
What I like about this one is that it has that nice rustic crust I like from artisan bread and because it's a basic recipe, I can use it as a base to try different things.
This is one I've recently finished perfecting and I'm quite happy with this variation.

Toasted slice of bread

You can borrow the book from the library. I found that it was available in both Markham and Toronto.

For this variation, I used half the recipe to create a loaf bread.
I like the loaf bread because I find it easier to cut and it's perfect size for 2 people to eat within 1 week.

Modifications
1. Add 1/3 cup of soaked dried cranberries.
2. Use the water used to soak the dried cranberries as the water the recipe calls for in the dough starter.
3. Add sunflower seeds
4. Add Ground Flaxseeds. (I've done with both whole and ground but I read that it's better to use ground because you can absorb all the benefits Flaxseeds bring vs it going through your system undigested)
5. Baking with La Cloche instead of just straight into the oven.

Method Modifications
In regards to adding the extra ingredients, I added them before the first rise so it has time to meld into the dough.

After Kneading the dough and it's ready, let it rest for 10 mins for the dough to relax.

Then press out the dough into a rectangle.

Do not press too thin or else the seeds and berries will cut right through the dough.

Once it's pressed out, I spread the ground flax seeds all over.

Then sprinkled both cranberries and sunflower seeds to cover the dough. (Picture to the Right)

Once that's done, I rolled it up like a jelly roll.
(Picture below)

Connect the ends to make a donut shape and knead softly a couple of times.








Then proceed as the instructions in the recipe.
You can make a round shape loaf or a loaf
If you wish to make a loaf, then follow the instructions for how to roll a loaf bread

The picture below is my loaf without tucked ends. You can tuck the ends to make it look prettier on the ends.

Baking with la cloche
I've tried both starting with a cold oven and starting with a preheated oven.
Some people say the crust is crisper if you preheat the over.
I do agree but honestly if you're scared of the la cloche cracking, go with the cold oven.
I found the baking time different between cold and preheated to be about 10 mins for my oven. It may very pending on how fast your oven heats up, so please check your break before you turn off the oven.

Cold Oven
If you decide to use a cold oven, place the bread in the la cloche with the top on and turn the oven on to 475 degree F.
Once the oven reaches temperature, start the timer for 10 mins then turn it down to 425.
I lifted the lid after 10 mins and only needed to bake it for an other 5 mins and it was done.

Preheated Oven
The Bread Bible will tell you to preheat the oven with the lid inside. The la cloche instructions will just tell you to preheat the oven.
I tried the Bread Bible method and my la cloche did not crack. This will be up to you for how confident you are with cracking or not.
Preheat to 475 degrees F, lid is optional.
Once it's preheated, place the bread in with both la cloche top and bottom and start the timer for 10 mins.
Turn down the heat to 425 and bake for 15 mins.
Lift the lid and cook for about 10 more mins afterwards. Check your bread as it will vary oven to oven.
Cooking time is very similar and to cold oven start. Really depends on how long it takes for your oven to heat up.

Happy baking

Using La Cloche Bottom for Pizza

I've been playing around with the La Cloche whenever I can and I know one of the things you can do with it is make pizza. If I look at their instructions, they put the pizza into the deep dish itself but if I want to make multiple, I don't know how to get a cooked pizza out and a new one in!

I don't have anything that can dig into the dish itself to get the pizza out so I had to figure out another way to use it.
My husband suggested using it upside down and I was very skeptical because it's bumpy and there's words. I really thought the dough would just stick to the bottom. But we tried it out and it worked great. No sticky at all!

Same pizza beer dough that I normally use, I'll eventually write up a post on it. ;)

When I put on the first pizza, the La Cloche was cold and out of the oven.
The oven was preheated and I put it in at 350 degrees. The dish didn't crack.
Once it was done I just used a normal plate and I lifted the pizza right off.

Getting the second one on was a little tricky since the stone was not hot.
I don't have a bread paddle so it was tricky.
We took the stone out of the oven and quickly put the rolled out dough on the stone.
Then the 2 of us put on all the toppings in less then 3 mins cause we didn't want the stone to get cold.
Then we popped it back in the oven. :)

Next time I'm going to try with my cookie sheet and lots of cornmeal to see if I can slide the pizza off of the sheet onto the plate right away.

Rustic Fall Theme Wedding Cake and Decorations

I'm so excited I finally got my wedding pictures from my photographer.
I had a fall wedding this year and did my own wedding cake.
The reception was at the Hart House at the University of Toronto.
It has a nice rustic setting and it's simple and elegant.
I wanted to do something to match the place and the fact that it was the fall.
So all my decorations for the wedding and the cake just ended up as a fall theme wedding.

I baked a 3 tier cake for my wedding. The top 6in is a dark chocolate cake with pistachio buttercream.
The 9in layer is a white chocolate cake with strawberry buttercream.
The bottom 12in layer is a vanilla cake with a mango and citrus buttercream.

Covered by fondant. The brown ribbon is also fondant.
Used leaves and a branch with pumpkin as decorations.
I used fishing wires to hold the leaves onto the cake.


This is the center pieces on the long tables we had. The color leaves we used in an effort to match the cake. All fall colors. We scattered small acorns and pumpkin along the long table since it's so long.

Along with some candles as well ;)

I weaved all the baskets myself. Rolled newspaper, white glued the rolls into tubes and used them to weave. After the spray paint job you can't even tell it was newspaper!


The headtable had garlands of fall color leaves for simplicity sake.

And our table seating was pretty much harvest color as well.

:) I'm so glad everything turned out so well. Had such a great time and I'm glad our guests did too.

For our cookie wedding favour, Click Here.

Match (Green Tea) Honey Spritz Cookie

 Originally we were going to give 2 bottles of wine per person for wedding favours. One day my hubby had and idea and asked why don't we do cookies and wine. I wasn't too thrill with the idea since we already have all the wine but I figured we can drink it ourselves if we want to.
So I decided to make green tea heart shape cookies since it's a recipe I've done before.

The nice thing about these cookies is that it's freezable so you can make them well ahead of time. The most I've tried freezing these cookies before eating them is 1 month. Since I know 1 month will work great, that's how far ahead I made the cookies.

I saran wrapped pairs of cookies so I can easily put them into the favour bags the day before the wedding.
I got these pretty favour bags on the left from China.

I found filling the gun to be very time consuming. Even more time consuming then it is to make the cookies and squeeze out each cookie. Since I had to make 200 cookies, I had 2 cookie guns going. I would fill while my hubby would squeeze it out.

The heart shape from the Wilson cookie gun isn't as good as you can see from the picture on the left.
It looks a bit weird but the cookie gun is easy to use.

I borrowed the second cookie gun from my friend.
Her's is an Italian brand cookie gun. It's harder to use but the heart shapes turn out a lot better as seen in the picture on the right.

Overall, the product taste good so I cared less about the shape.

Match Honey Spritz Cookie

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp matcha
• 180g non bleach all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 113.5g butter
• 50g sugar
• 1 egg
• 50g honey
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degree F.
2. In a bowl, mix together the matcha, flour, baking powder and salt. 
3. In another bowl, cream the butter until fluffy using a stand mixer or a hand mixer. 
4. Add the sugar, egg and vanilla to the butter and beat until evenly mixed and fluffy.
5. Add the dry mixture to the ingredients and mix until the dry ingredients is just incorporated. The dough should look shaggy and somewhat fluffy.
6. Check if the dough is too wet, if it is, add more flour.
7. Load the dough into the cookie gun and press the dough onto a cold, ungreased cookie sheet.
8. Bake for 8-12 minutes or until the cookies are lightly golden brown around the edges. Remove from heat and onto cooling grid.

Enjoy :)

Birthday Cupcakes Oct 2014 - Strawberry Buttercream and Lemon Buttercream

It's been a while since I posted since I was crazy busy with moving and the wedding. But I finally did something I want to post about (besides my wedding cake, I'll do that when I get the official pictures)

This year we celebrated 4 birthdays at the same time as Thanksgiving. My husband, brother, niece and nephew are all born in October.
So what sort of cake do I make to celebrate 4 birthdays?
This year I went with cupcakes! Multiple for everyone.

Actually I was super excited this year to try out a new buttercream recipe.
I recently experimented with Swiss Buttercream and found out just how big of a difference methods contributes to the final product!
I used the exact same egg white:butter:sugar ratio as I normally do for my Italian Meringue Buttercream (minus the water because I don't need it anymore) and it was amazing!
It was every fluffier then normal!
I was so happy. This is now my new go to method.

Ratio-wise I'm still playing with it to see if I can decrease the butter and sugar a bit more to see if it'll get even fluffier.
I'll eventually settle on something I really like.
I also need to check if making my own butter helped too. That was also quite easy. Machine did all the work :)

Until then, here is the method I'm now using.

1. Mix sugar into the egg whites and whip over a double boiler set up.
2. Keep hand mixing until whites are 160 degrees F
3. Once it's at 160 degrees, remove from heat and mix in stand mixer Thick, glossy and cool. Can take up to 10 mins.**
4. Add in the whipped butter and mix until smooth. (if the butter is not pre-whipped, you can add it in little chunks at a time. I find with my stand mixer and pre-whipped butter I can drop in the entire thing)
5. Flavour accordingly

**Whipping time depends on the mixing stand you use!! I have a Bosch Universal Plus and it only takes about 3-5 mins to whip up on speed 4! I talked to the ladies at healthykitchens and they said with older Bosch machines you should use speed 3 and it takes about the same amount of time.
My friend uses a Kitchen Aid Stand mixer and it takes her about 10 mins. So please watch while it whips. I've tried whipping it for 10 mins before and nothing really changed too much, maybe a little less fluffy but at least it didn't collapse.

This time I made Strawberry and Lemon butter cream :) both were a hit.
I added a small fondant star for decoration on them just for cute factor

Have fun experimenting!

Pesto Chicken Beer Crust Pizza

At my parent's house we cook Chinese food every weekday. Since we have all the Chinese seasoning on hand, cooking Chinese food is the easy way out. On weekends my brother and I like to mix things up sometimes if we're not feeling lazy. Pizza surprisingly can be quite labour intensive depending on what type of ingredients you use.

If you use things like pepperoni, already cooked meats, pre-sliced veggie and shredded cheese, then it's super easy.

For this Pizza, I used homemade beer crust dough and Pesto sauce.

I'll eventually write separate posts for those items.

Pesto Chicken Beer Crust Pizza

Makes 1-12 inch pizza, Prep Time: 30 mins Cook Time: 20 - 40 mins

Ingredients

• 300-500g Pizza Dough (Depends on crust thickness and size of pan)
• 1 Chicken thigh meat (sliced and cooked)
• half an onion sliced
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 3 Tbsp Pesto Sauce (a little more doesn't hurt)
• 200g Mozzarella

Directions

1. If you're making your own pizza dough, make it and let it sit for 30 mins while you prep the rest of your ingredients.
2. While the dough is sitting, slice up the onions and dice up the garlic. Cook in a little bit of oil in a pan on medium heat to slowly caramelize the onion. Doesn't have to be fully caramelize when you use it for this pizza.
3. Cut the chicken meat into small bite size piece. Add to the pan and cook the meat
4. Let your toppings cool
5. Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (or to the max heat your pan allows, I like 400 as it makes my crust nice and crunchy)
6. Grate your mozzarella
7. Roll our your pizza to your prefer thickness. The one in the picture above was cracker like because I like my super thin crust pizza.
8. Spread the pesto on the dough. Since this is pesto, cover even the the edges, your crust will taste awesome.
9. Spread a thin layer of cheese
10. Add the chicken, onion and garlic topping.
11. Add the rest of the cheese
12. Bake until the crust is brown and the cheese is all melted. Depending on thickness of your dough, can take anywhere from 20 mins to 45 hour. So keep an eye on it.

Not too complicated. :)

Simple Flower Pattern with Strawberries

It's summer time and it's almost time to pick the July strawberries.
Strawberries are not only yummy but they make great decorations for your cakes!
You can make simple yet elegant designs all by slicing up strawberries and placing them in specific patterns.

The default shape of the strawberries are great to work with. Pick out the small and large strawberries and dedicate them for different roles. (large sharp ones for the base of the flower, smaller pieces go go in the middle etc)

This flower design is actually very easy. The only thing that took a lot of time was slicing up the strawberries.
The cake I baked in this post is the Almond Chiffon cake from the Cake Bible.
They're 9 inch in diameter and 2 in tall each.

I used Raspberry Greek Yogurt as the filling in-between.

Take your strawberries, wash them and pluck out the greens at the top.
Then slice up the strawberries vertically.
Once you have a good pile of various sizes, you can start assembly.

Use the bigger pieces with a pointy end first and lay them in a big ring. I centered mine so that it'll end up right in the middle.
Once you're done 1 ring, lay the next ring overlapped on the first one. Overlap them halfway on top of the first layer and put the new slice in the middle between the strawberries that are already there.
Keep on going until you're almost in the middle
With my 9 inch cake and the first layer about an inch in from the edge, I only needed 3 layers of strawberries before I started using smaller strawberries and standing them up.
For the middle, use smaller slices and slant the first batch. Keep on going and eventually your middle ones will stand up straight.
If you want, you can even use a whole strawberry in the middle with the pointy side up.

Since I had left over strawberry slices, I did the sides as well.
No need for any yogurt or cream to stick the strawberries.

Pretty and simple!
Enjoy your summer treat!!

Soft White Loaf Bread

My recipe is adopted from pain de mie. The original recipe is in Chinese, I had to get my mom to translate it for me. I modified the method and a little bit of the ingredients to suit my taste.

On the original website, she said to split the dough if it's too much for the pan but she didn't tell how to tell if it's too much...

So after some research, this is the measurement I decided to use: 900g for a 9x5x3in pan or 600g for a 8x4.5x2.5in pan.

So measure your pan before you bake to determine how much dough you'll need.  

One thing I found out when measuring, is that the width you see on the paper, is measured across the top and not the bottom since the bottom is more narrow and the top is wider.

This recipe adds up to slightly lower then 600g so I used a 8x4.5x2.5in pan since it was the closet pan size.

Soft White Loaf Bread

Ingredient

• 300g bread flour
• 4g instant yeast
• 5g salt
• 25g honey
• 15g oil
• 195g milk, i have 1% milk at home so this doesn't add a lot of fat (130g is 2/3 of the milk, measure this out first because you might not need all 195g. Depends on humidity)
• 15g butter
• This adds up to 559g

Directions

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together.
2. Add in honey, oil and 130g of the milk and mix well.
3. Knead the dough and slowly add more milk as required. Even if you're not mixing it by hand, you should be able to see how well the dough is absorbing the milk to judge if you need more. Or you can always stop the machine and feel the dough.
4. Knead until it is smooth and elastic. Best test I found was the window pane test.
5. Knead in the butter
6. Let it rise to about 2 times the size. When you press a finger in, it should spring back slowly. 
7. Flip onto table and deflate. Then fold the left side 1/3 and right side over the folded side. Then do the same thing up and down.
8. Flip around and cup the dough with palms facing you. Pull the bread into you. Do that on all 4 sides so in the end you'll have a round shape.
9. Let it rest for 20-30 mins
10. Press on it to degas, try to keep it in a circle
11. Make a triangle shape by folder the right and left side towards the middle at a slant
12. Start at the pointy end and roll towards you
13. Once you finished rolling, tuck in the ends and put the dough edge side down into the pan.
14. Let it rise to double to triple the size.
15. Use the poke test to see how much longer does it need to rise. When you poke the dough, the indent is suppose to slowly come back and not to the full point. It should actually stay a bit indented. If it rises back right away, then you need to poof longer, if it doesn't rise back at all, it's overpoofed.
16. Bake it at 375 degree F for 35 mins.

Tip: If your house is cold, turn on the oven light and put your bowl in there to let the bread rise. My house is 17-19 degrees C in the winter so I have to do this. It works quite well

The more I did research into bread making, the more scientific I found it. It can be easy if your oven, material etc matches nicely the recipe you find. If something varies, like temperature or material, it can become very complex to troubleshoot and adjust the recipe unless you understand the science behind making bread. 

But I find it very fun. After a several loaves, I think I finally have a good feel for my mixing machine and the proofing process.

So don't get discourage if the first time doesn't pan out for you. 

Cranberry Buttermilk Scones

I love baking with buttermilk. I find buttermilk baked goods to have awesome moisture as well as flavour.

Since buttermilk comes in 1 L cartons, whenever I buy it to bake 1 item, I end up baking a whole bunch of items to use it all up.

This scone recipe is very easy and fast to make.

They turn out moist and fluffy and helps me use up the buttermilk :)

Usually I always measure out the ingredients by weight but I find that it's not necessary for the scones

Just need measuring cups, spoons, a fork and a bowl to make the scones

Ingredients

3 cups all purpose flour 

1/3 cup Brown sugar 

2 1/2tsp baking powder 

3/4 salt 

1/2 tsp baking Soda 

3/4 cup cold butter (170.25g) 

1 cup buttermilk 

1 cup dried cranberries 

1tsp grated orange peel (Optional)

Directions

1. Combine dry ingredients in a bowl 

2. Cut in butter until crumbly 

3. Gently stir in buttermilk until just combined 

4. Fold in cranberries and orange peel

5. Turn onto table and make 2 6in disks or make them into 4 smaller disks

6. Put them on a pan and cut each into 6 wedges but leave them together. 

7. Brush with buttermilk and sprinkle sugar on top. The sugar is optional. I typically don't add it but it can add a nice crunch. 

8. Bake at 400 degrees for 15-20 mins or until golden brown. The smaller disk will cook faster. 

Lavender Honey Shortbread Cookies

So I've been wanting to make cookies from Lavender for a while. I remember the horrible lavender Gelato I had in Italy because they over used Lavender but I couldn't help but wonder how would it taste like if I use the right amount of Lavender.

So, I finally made an effort and went to Nora's Natural Food store to pick up some lavender.

I looked through several different recipes and decided to use this one with a bit of adjustment
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2008/09/honey-lavender-shortbread-cookies-recipe.html
The recipe still needs a little bit of tweeking. I'm actually unsure if the saltiness was due to the lavender or if I added too much salt.

I'll post what I actually ended up doing when I finish tweeking the recipe.

On a whole, the lavender is a unique taste. I would adjust to have slightly less lavender.
If you don't over use lavender, it won't taste like you're eating perfume.  
I will definitely try making these again but after some tweeks.

Recipe with minor tweeks thus far

Ingredients
2 Cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking poweder
2 tsp lavender (I liked a little bit less as lavender is very strong)
6 ounces of butter
2 tbsp honey
1/2 cup icing sugar

Grind lavender in a spice grinder, add some of the flour to the grinder if you find that it's not grinding well. I grind the lavender until it was fairly fine

Mix the flour, baking powder and lavender together in a medium size bowl

Cream the butter, honey and sugar. Beat until well mixed
Add the dry ingredients and mix until it's combined

Place onto parchment paper and roll it out (I like to use Gordan Ramsey's technique that he does for the beef wellington to make my roll, video 5:50 mark)

Place into fridge and wait for it to firm up.
Cut into 1/5 inch thick disks.

Cook for 15min or until light golden brown in a 350 degree F oven.