Chocolate & Lavender Cookies

Maybe you've tried the chocolate-chilli combination before, but it's not usual that people use spicy ingredients in desserts, right? Because of some unknown reasons, I like experimenting with spicy desserts and after my Bonfire cake, here is a new recipe. This time I show you some soft chocolate cookies with lavender and orange zest and we will add some medium heat chilli sauce too to our Chocolate & Lavender Cookies!

The sauce itself caught my attention a few months ago when I've discovered the products of Sárréti Chilifarm. They have a lavender-flavoured chilli sauce, called Levendurva, and the recipe was created by Dani Sass. He is one of the hosts of 'Ide süss' -the Hungarian version of The Great British Bake Off- and he has an imposing Instagram feed in lifestyle-travel-sport and gastro topics.

When I saw this unique flavour combination, I instantly had the idea of these cookies in my head.

Ingredients

Cookie dough

120 g flour
150 g sugar
90 g butter at room temperature
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla bean paste
3 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
a pinch of salt
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp Levendurva chilli sauce from Sárréti Chilifarm
1 tsp orange zest, freshly grated
1 tsp culinary lavender, dried

Decoration

100 g white chocolate
1 tbsp oil
Orange zest, freshly grated
Culinary lavender, dried

Instructions

Use your stand mixer to mix the butter and the sugar till you get a creamy consistency.
Mix in the egg and the vanilla bean paste as well.
In a separate bowl sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.
Mix the dry ingredients into the butter-egg mixture till you get a smooth dough.
Incorporate the chilli sauce, orange zest, and lavender then mix it well.
Use two tablespoons to create about 15 portions of the dough on a lined baking tray.
Bake the cookies in the preheated oven, at 180 °C, for about 10 minutes.
Let the cookies cool down a little bit on the baking tray, then transfer them to a cooling rack and let them cool down completely before decorating.
To temperating the white chocolate we need lover temperature than we use for milk and dark choc, it's around 29 °C this time. Without a thermometer just melt the two-thirds of white chocolate above steam together with the oil which gives the shine. When it's almost melted, remove the top pot from above the steam, add the leftover one-third of chocolate and stir with a silicone spatula till it's completely melted.
Dip the cookies in the melted chocolate and sprinkle some lavender and orange zest on the white choc part.
I personally put the cookies in the fridge till the choc set.