Limes

Mr T&T was given beautiful limes from a work colleague. I immediately entrusted my lovely assistant, Google, to do a little lime research for me.
So many ideas so little time or limes, to be precise. As I am always going down the sweet route, I was thinking of biscuits /cookies, lime meringue pie, pound cake or chiffon cake.

The winners were ...

Martha Steward's Lime meltaways. (Recipe can be found on the Martha Stewart webite. )


The other recipe was my Mothers famous orange chiffon cake. For this cake I swapped the orange juice for lime juice. After I had made and tasted the cake I felt that it needed a more lime flavor.

My thoughts on introducing more lime flavour is as follows:

1) For the orange chiffon cake 1Tblsp of zest is required, for the lime chiffon cake I would add 2 Tblsp of the lime zest.
2) A drizzle of lime glaze would be delicious. ( Lime juice and icing sugar mixed together.)
3) Saving the best for last, whipped cream with flecks of delicious lime zest folded through.
This girl loves cream.

For the Lime meltaway recipe, the ingredients are as follows, butter, flour, icing/confectioners sugar, vanilla essence, cornflour/starch, coarse salt, lime juice and lime zest.
The Lime meltaway recipe requires 1/3 of the icing/confectioners sugar be used in the making of the dough. The other 2/3 of icing/confectioners sugar is used to toss the baked Lime meltways in. As I was using a glaze, I only required the 1/3 of icing/confectioners sugar.

The recipe instructions were to cream butter and icing/confectioners sugar using the whisk attachment, normally I would cream butter and sugar using the paddle attachment. I did as I 'read' being, the good person that I am :)
Next, add lime juice and lime zest as well as the vanilla essence. Whisk until all the liquid has been incorporated. I ended up mixing this stage by hand as it was taking too long in the mixer.

As I did not want to over mix my dough, I stoped the mixer just before the flour is fully incorporated and using a spatula finish mixing the dough by hand.

Turn out onto your work bench and gently press together, again you do not want to overwork your dough.

On a floured surface roll out to your desired diameter and wrap in clingfilm.

Martha Stewart gave a fabulous tip on her show 'Martha Bakes'. Using the inner sleeve from a paper towel roll, cut down the one side. Place your rolled dough inside the sleeve and allow to firm up in the fridge.
Without the sleeve, you are likely to have a roll of dough with one flat edge.
The dough that is left in the fridge to firm up in the cardboard sleeve, will remain in a round sausage shape.Greatest tip ever !

Cut the dough into rounds.

Place on a parchment paper lined tray. During baking these cookies do not spread out very much, they can be place fairly close to each other.

My glaze was made using icing/confectioners sugar and lime juice. As I wanted a good covering on my Lime meltaways my glaze was not too runny. For a more transparent glaze, add more lime juice to your glaze mix.

Dip your Lime meltaway in the glaze, gently scraping off the excess. If your glaze is runny, you may not need to do this step. While glaze is still wet, to add a little more flavour, sprinkle with lime zest. This identifies the cookie as lime, it also looks really pretty.

Now could someone please put the kettle on !