Recipe: Chai Tea Cookies

While glossy sugar cookies and stylish Christmas bars get the glamour shots during holiday cookie season, my heart belongs to the quieter cookies, the buttery yet simple ones that are meant to lie beside a cup of afternoon tea and join the respite a tea break offers in busy days. These chai tea cookies, a riff on my old favorite of Earl Grey Tea Cookies, fill that spot on the tea saucer sweetly and neatly.

This thin, crisp, flaky shortbread flecked with black tea and spices is one of the simplest cookie recipes I know, and it comes together in just a few moments in the food processor. (If you don’t have a food processor you can make the dough by hand, working the butter into the dry ingredients with a pastry blender until it holds together in a rough, moldable mass.) You don’t need a big food processor; I usually make this recipe in my 3-cup food chopper.

Once the dough is made, you chill or freeze it in a log, ready to be sliced and baked; and like any other good icebox cookie, it can then be gifted either as baked cookies or in its frozen state. I like to wrap up logs of this dough in white freezer paper, tie a ribbon around one end, and write the baking instructions right on the paper. This is a sweet offering for the freezer and for a busy cook who might appreciate a crisp, buttery wafer of a cookie, redolent with spice and the smoky savor of black tea, during her afternoon tea break.