Tea Bag Cookies - Perfect for a Sherlock Holmes or Downton Abbey Party!

Everyone is hooked on "Sherlock Holmes" or "Downton Abbey" (we're a "Poirot" family, ourselves) so what better way to enjoy the shows than by enjoying some tea bag cookies! These would also be great for a wedding shower, a tea party, Mother's or Father's Day, etc. I found these on FrostMeBlog but incorporated the recipe from Food Network. And yes, it takes three sticks of butter! I was able to make 45 cookies but I think you could probably make 60 (I just put the remaining dough in the fridge for another time).

If you watch the video of Barefoot Contessa making these, there are three things she says to do that I didn't and they still came out great:

1. The butter doesn't have to be room temperature. I took the sticks out of the fridge and straight into the mixing bowl.

2. I didn't separately mix the flour and salt and then add that to the butter mixture. I poured the flour straight into the mixer because I didn't want to dirty another bowl!

3. You don't need 6-7 ounces of semisweet chocolate - I was able to do it with 4 ounces.

Once you've made your dough, wrap it in plastic wrap and stick in the fridge. While it's chilling for 30 minutes, that's a perfect time to make your tea bag template. I just eyeballed it, using a corner of a piece of paper for the straight edges. Cut it out and then transferred it to a piece of wax paper. You really don't have to cut out more than one because you can use it over and over again.

Take the dough out and roll it out 1/2" thick using a rolling pin. Note: put flour on the rolling pin before rolling out the dough! Otherwise, the dough will stick to the pin and make a mess. Trust me on this one...

Once it's rolled out, take the wax paper template and cut the tea bags. You can use a knife, a pizza cutter, whatever's easiest for you. As I said, you can probably make 60 cookies with how much dough you're going to make. Cut out the tea bags and place them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Once all the cookies are on the parchment paper, take a frosting tip or a toothpick and cut out holes at the top of the tea bags. Make sure you do this before you put the cookies in the oven, otherwise you won't be able to string through your tea bag tags.

Put the cookies in the oven for 18-20 minutes. The recipe says for 20-25 minutes but I found that around 18 minutes, they were definitely brown on the bottom.

But while the cookies are in the oven, get your chocolate ready. As I said, I just used 1 box of Baker's Semi-Sweet Chocolate (4 oz) and had enough to cover 43 cookies. Make sure you chop up 2oz. first, put them in the microwave for 30 seconds, chop up the other 2oz., put that in the bowl, and microwave again for another 30 seconds. That way, you won't burn the chocolate.

I gave the cookies about 3 minutes to cool before dipping them in the chocolate. Once all the cookies were covered, I put them in the fridge for 15 minutes, just so the chocolate could harden faster.

If you want to add a string and teabag tag, you certainly can, but I was too hungry to make too many! Enjoy your tea bag cookies! Cheerio!

TOTAL COSTS: $2.99 for Baker's chocolate
Butter, sugar, vanilla, flour, and salt already on hand
Baker's chocolate - $2.99 at Vons

TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: About 2 hours
15 minutes to make the dough
30 minutes to let the dough chill
30 minutes to cut out 40 cookies
18 minutes in the oven
3 minutes to cool
10 minutes to dip all the cookies in chocolate
15 minutes to chill chocolate in fridge

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 2 out of 5
The two things that might make things difficult for you are 1.) melting the chocolate and 2.) making sure the cookies don't burn in your oven. Keep an eye on both, though, and you should be fine!