Summer Idea #1: Raspberry Tea Ice Cubes

According to my dad, these are the "puppy days of summer." By that, he means the dog days of summer. Oh Dad. Haha.

But he is right in that these past weeks have brought Ithaca hot, extremely humid weather. Not the type of atmosphere for baking things. So instead, I've been coming up with cool, refreshing things to make. I currently have two more posts ready to be typed up and published, but I figured I'd start with the easiest!

This may also be the prettiest of the three.

Raspberry tea ice cubes! (Plus two watermelon juice ice cubes, because there was some juice leftover from our nightly fruit escapades.)

I paired these ice cubes (paired... who am I kidding. I mean, gracelessly dumped the ice cubes into a glass) with some lychee juice. This isn't a juice I usually see in grocery stores, but I went with my mom to one of the two local Asian grocery stores and the cute little juice boxes caught my eye!

If you can't find lychee juice, or if you'd just rather try something else, these ice cubes would also go incredibly well with lemonade or iced tea! That'd have a fun name: Tea Ice Iced Tea.

The tea ice cubes are also great for when a beverage otherwise tastes too sweet. A lot of the ice tea sold in stores tend to be too sugary for my taste but since I haven't added any sugar into the tea prior to freezing, the ice cubes can dilute the sweetness without weakening the flavor.

Anyways, this is so easy that I won't even call it a recipe; it's more of an idea, hence the title for the blog post. You could also choose to make this with a different flavor tea. Lemon, orange, apple, peach... they all sound tasty!

INGREDIENTS
- Juice of choice (for me, lychee)
- 1 teabag (like raspberry - look at the rhyming parantheses!)
- an ice cube tray? (technically not an ingredient...)

P.S. the peanut butter jar full of flowers is just for decoration. Not to eat.

Heat up some water, then let the tea steep until desired strength. Since this raspberry tea has a fairly strong flavor, I didn't let it steep for too long.

Pour into ice cube tray.

Stick it into the freezer!

Pour out juice (I probably had a little too much fun squeezing the lychee juice out of the juicebox) and add ice cubes!

So easy, and so pretty! And if the ice cubes melt, you can then call it "Raspberry Tea-infused Lychee Juice."

How fancy of me. It's all in the linguistics. Most importantly though: tastes delicious!

Enjoy!

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies (gluten free!)

If I could only eat one type of cookie for the rest of my life, these would be it.

Flourless peanut butter cookies. That's right. No hands flour, ma!

I first made these when one of my friends found out she had Celiac disease. I think these were the cookies that launched my recent obsession with baking.

They are definitely that good. Since then, I've made them two more times within the past couple of months. And somehow, I've managed to make things harder for myself each time. The second time I thought- wow, how good would these be with bananas? Only to find out quite vividly the next day that fresh bananas turn brown (not shown... heh) when in contact with warm surfaces.

Doh. This time, I tried to make these in 85+ °F weather. I probably would have made it unscathed (well, the cookies would have- no Amy's were harmed in the making of these cookies!) if not for the fact that I stopped every other minute to take photographs.

By then, so much moisture from the humid air had seeped into the batter that it effectively messed up the ratio of wet to dry ingredients... resulting in cookies that spread way too much in the oven.

These cookies do spread out, but the humidity doesn't help. This could probably be solved by sticking the dough into the fridge for a couple of minutes before shaping them into balls, but even the thin cookies are very delicious! And it's a great excuse to keep all the cookies to yourself. Or, you could salvage them by forming them into smaller cookies using any type of cookie cutter (or even a bottlecap could do the job)!

The original recipe comes from Averie Cooks, who also has other variations of these cookies, including a chocolate chunk version! Yummy.

INGREDIENTS

- ¾ cup white sugar
- ¼ cup brown sugar
- 1 egg *
- 1 cup peanut butter
- ½ tsp vanilla extract
- (optional) brown sugar and/or white sugar for sprinkling.

*I used a large egg.



Preheat your oven to 350°F, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Combine all the ingredients in one bowl! It may be easier to mix the sugars, egg, and vanilla extract first, and then add in the peanut butter, but you can also add everything in one go. I don't really need to provide a step-by-step process for this, but here are some photos:

(Admittedly, I did decide to replicate these cookies because I wanted to show you the neat manicure I did the other day! That, and I've received requests for the recipe from a few friends, which makes me really happy!)

Right. So, mix all the ingredients together!

Roll your dough into small spheres, about 1-inch wide. (You could just as easily make them larger or smaller, but adjust the baking time accordingly.) Optional: you could sprinkle some brown and/or white sugar on the top of the cookies. (You can tell that these particular cookies are already starting to spread too much.)

You could leave them in spheres, which is the easiest and most fool-proof option, or you could experiment!  Many peanut butter cookies have a distinctive criss-cross patterning, so you could use a fork to create that design.

(Lightly press the tines into the cookie dough, and drag it back and forth to deepen the grooves. You don't want the cookies to flatten out too much, because as I mentioned, they do tend to spread during baking.)

Or, you might try this cute button design that I randomly decided to make!

Press down lightly on the cookie to make a slightly flatter (plateau!) top.

I then used a cap from a bottle of water to create the circle.

Then use a toothpick to create four little circles!

(These looked really cute the first time I made them.)

Bake for 10 minutes, but keep an eye on the cookies. These bake very quickly, and could go from raw to burnt in a matter of a few extra minutes.

Mine usually bake quite well when I leave them in for 12 minutes, with a slight crisp to the bottom of the cookies, 10 minutes for softer, chewier cookies. I only left them in for 10 minutes this time, because by the time I stopped watching Confederations Cup coverage to check on the cookies, they had already spread out, and I decided to nip that in the bud the best I could.

I was just going to show you photos from the last time that I made these...

But I don't give up so easily! I realized that I had a nice heart-shaped cookie cutter, and since these cookies are quite soft, even after cooling for 20 minutes, they were nicely transformed into cute little hearts!

Perfect little snacks, and I just so happened to go out for dinner with a couple that work with my mom that just got engaged (that sentence had too many clauses, didn't it...), so it all worked out perfectly!

(Plus, the scraps from the cookie-cutting endeavor are great for snacking. Shh, don't tell my mom where I'm planning to hide the cookie container!)