from the kitchen - a nice cuppa tea

When we were little my brother and I would ask our mum what she wanted for Mother's Day. And every year she would reply with the same thing "a handmade card and a nice cuppa tea". And when we were little we would come home from school on a Friday afternoon clutching our handmade cards, and on Sunday morning we would dutifully head into the kitchen to make her a nice cuppa tea.

Fast-forward a couple of years and my brother and are are (relatively) grown-up, we both have jobs. Our littlest brother hands my mum the card he made at school and a bunch of flowers bought with his pocket money. I hand my mum a box of hand-rolled truffles. My brother slopes in after an hour or two, still in last nights clothes, hand shoved in pockets and after sheepishly apologising for his tardiness and his empty handedness mumbles "can I make you a mother's day cup of tea?"

I don't know where I got the idea for these tea-bag cookies from. I'll be honest, I scrawled a doodle onto a post-it a couple of weeks ago, having seen something somewhat similar somewhere. So I take no credit for the idea.

The recipe is Nigella's cut-out cookies - such a lovely soft dough that promises not to spread when cooking. Just to be on the safe side I followed these steps on rolling and chilling perfect sugar cookies from Sweetapolita. I cut the shapes freehand, thinking about it now, I should have probably made a paper template or at least used a ruler for perfect edges - but I didn't, so all my tea-bags are slightly different shapes. And while I followed all the steps and the recipe exactly, they did spread slightly, but a sharp knife to the edges straight from the oven tidied them up.

Dipped in melted dark chocolate and finished with little tags - just add homemade card action et voila!

And yes, I know I did those handprint flowers once before, but I thought they were so darn adorable the first time!



Blue Skies (and Happy day for Mamas!)

Charlotte xo