High altitude gardening, in my experience, involves cultivating cool-season and quick-growing plants, but it also requires the nurturance of a certain fatalism about growing produce in a place where everything is apt to freeze around Labor Day—which is when classic garden veggies like squash and tomatoes have probably just hit their stride after their inevitable late start.
Every four or five years, though, the first autumnal frosts hold off until late September, and sometimes beyond. The temperature dropped to 32 degrees on September 21 and falling daytime temperatures have slowed the frenetic growth of the pole beans and zucchini, but the garden has not yet suffered a hard freeze.
You might think this would mean I’d walk through the gate and breathe in the essence of dirt and vegetal growth, with just a background hint of straw and hay from those leaves that, despite the lack of a killing frost, have begun to surrender to the terminal dictates of cool nights and shortening days.
Instead, I enter the garden and think about cookies.
There’s a law about unintended consequences, isn’t there? And cautionary tales about the things we should see coming but don’t?
I never expected that experimenting with lavender flowers in the kitchen would create such an incongruous response in the place where I spread horse manure and worm castings. I mean, sure, the garden is partly about growing food, although I’ve also encouraged flowers there—so much so that some of the walking paths are overrun by whatever blooming volunteer I’ve over-indulged most recently (this year is was penstemons). I love when the garden fills up with plants I’ll be able to eat, but I also like the color and texture and aromas flowers provide. It tickles me to listen to the hum as pollinators visit daisies, sage, cosmos, pansies, daylilies, and columbine, with the odd hummingbird zinging in to assess the offerings.
So, really…cookies?
Yeah. And the lavender doesn’t even have to be in flower; just brushing the plant is enough to release the perfume and send my brain fantasizing about baked goods. It doesn’t help that there’s a sprawling lavender shrub immediately in front of you as you enter the garden—which is also the parent to several of the aforementioned volunteers encroaching on the pathways as you walk further in.
What’s interesting is that I haven’t made lavender cookies all that much. I’ve mixed up a batch once or twice a summer over the past couple of years, experimenting with gluten free recipes (wheat and I do not get along), with the quantity of lavender, with fresh versus dried flowers, with lemon and without. We’re talking about an aromatic and interesting now-and-again cookie here, not a staff-of-life pantry essential. But I’m intrigued, as I always am, by the possibility of using something that thrives in the garden with minimal effort on my part. And I do like the familiar yet faintly exotic flavor, and have gotten caught up in the challenge of striking the right balance: a cookie that’s quick and easy to mix up, that’s not overly sweet, that isn’t chalky, that’s floral and complex without becoming soapy.
I’m focused on icebox cookie recipes, the dough for which I can form into a roll to freeze. I love the idea of having this stashed away should we ever again have guests, but the real beauty of it is that I can have an easily portioned sweet nosh on hand while the frozen dough puts a process—thawing, slicing, preheating the toaster oven—between my hand and cookie jar.
This all strikes me as eminently sensible, but my nose is not a pragmatist. Lavender is a potent and distinctive scent, and my brain has established a positive association between it and fresh cookies.
This is the unforeseen effect, the unintended consequence of my baking experiments—although I probably should have seen it coming. The human sensation of smell follows a simple neural path, running more or less straight from nostrils to amygdala and hippocampus; scent is notoriously tied to emotion and memory. The animal nose helped our ancestors survive by locating, and remembering how to find, and determining as tasty, food that was edible and fresh, while cueing them to avoid the putrid and potentially toxic.
For me, it seems, there’s no turning back. My hippocampus knows what it knows: where there is lavender, there just might be dessert.
***
Almond Lavender Shortbread
This recipe is adapted from The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook by Elana Amsterdam. The dough freezes well and the results are suitable for vegans—although not, obviously, for anyone allergic to nuts (sorry, Lisa). The cookies are rich but not overly sweet.
2 1/4 cups almond flour
1/4 cup gluten free flour mix (I like Bob’s Red Mill 1-to-1 Baking Flour here; a starchy mix helps the cookies hold together)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1-2 tablespoons dried lavender florets, to taste and depending on the potency of your supply
7 tablespoons (scant 1/2 cup) grapeseed oil
5 tablespoons agave nectar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a medium bowl, whisk together oil, agave, and vanilla, then stir into the dry ingredients until well combined. Roll the dough into a log about 2 inches in diameter and wrap in waxed or parchment paper. Freeze until firm, at least 1 hour. Slice thin (1/8”) with a wet knife. Place slices baking sheets (original recipe calls for lining them with parchment, but I’ve never bothered and everything works out fine) in a 350 degree oven. Leave the cookies on the sheets to cool thoroughly before serving.
Lavender Icebox Cookies
A more traditional version, adapted from the basic vanilla refrigerator cookie recipe in Joy of Cooking. I’m detailing my gluten free mix here; if you can eat wheat, just swap out 1 1/2 cups of regular flour, it will make things so much easier. If you are wheat-avoidant and have a packaged flour mix you like, use it, but the blend I’ve given here yields cookies that I think have a taste and texture most reminiscent of wheat flour. Special note: if you’re adapting recipes for gluten-free purposes, reduce the sugar. Alternative flours seem to play with sugar differently than wheat flour, and will come out sickening sweet if you don’t compensate. This recipe has been adjusted.
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 beaten egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
2/3 cup oat flour
1/3 cup almond flour
1/4 cup chickpea flour OR Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose Flour (red package)
1/4 cup starchy gluten free flour mix, such as Bob’s Red Mill 1-to-1 Baking Flour (blue package)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1-2 tablespoons dried lavender florets, to taste and depending on the potency of your supply
Cream butter until soft. Blend in sugar until creamy, then beat in the egg and vanilla. In a separate bowl, mix dry ingredients except lavender; add to butter/sugar and mix until smooth. Stir in lavender. The dough is sticky, so parchment paper works better for rolling here. Chill log until firm, slice thin, and bake at 375 degrees for 7 to 9 minutes.
If you’re using frozen dough from either recipe, set it out for 15 to 20 minutes before slicing off however many cookies you want to bake with a sharp knife. Baking temperatures/times are the same.
I have never thought of using lavender in cookies . But now I will Thanks!
The lavender is perhaps an acquired taste, Anne, but it is fun and different. Thanks so much for stopping by the blog.
I especially like, “My hippocampus knows what it knows: where there is lavender, there just might be dessert.” Yummy writing.
The association has actually become a little bit maddening, Pat…but that doesn’t seem to have stopped me from collecting stems with flowers on the verge of opening to dry.
I have got to get some lavender plants. I know I have had them in previous years and they must have frozen. So I need to get some indoor ones.
Oh heavens, Linda, be careful what you wish for. I might put your name on one of these high-country-adapted volunteer lavender plants, and once I find a way to get it to you you’ll never be rid of the stuff….