When your loud mind is kept quiet by late
night cab rides and origami in toilets and voices and friendly smiles, it does
seem like the sky has opened up for a moment, and a light hits the skyscrapers
and the rooftops and your skin and the City looks all pretty and shiny below
your feet. But when midnight comes again and reality falls right onto your head
from four metres high, the only companion you’re left with is a face so tired and
puffy that you could cause criminal offence by the way you look; along with a concerning
amount of broken things to fix. It’s only then that you finally realiseyou’ve got to take your usual crammed
bus home and hang your head in shame, have porridge for dinner and employ
what’s left of your strength to dig out that recipe you came up with during that part of your life when you
were crossing paths with a part-time cookie monster and full-time ally. And even
though there’s a high chance of your face being painful to look at for quite
some time still, sitting together eating tinned fruit salad and sipping Turkish
bottled water and munching peach tea cookies makes you feel like things are a
little bit less broken already.
PEACH TEA COOKIES
120ml (1/2 cup) sunflower oil or other
flavourless oil
160g (3/4 cup) sugar
80g (1/4 cup) agave syrup
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
the tea leaves from two bags of peach tea
130g (1 cup) plain flour
130g (1 cup) self-raising flour
1 tablespoon cornflour
2 tablespoons soya milk or other non-dairy
milk
Preheat the oven to 170°C (340°F) and line
two cookie trays. Cream the oil, sugar, agave syrup and vanilla extract
together in a mixing bowl and stir in the peach tea leaves. Sift in the two
flours and cornflour. Add the milk and stir until everything comes together as
a smooth dough. Divide the dough into balls of about 40g each and press each
ball into a disc on the cookie tray, placing them apart to allow the cookies to
spread. Bake for about 10 minutes, until the tops are slightly cracked and the
edges turn golden brown. Cool on the trays for at least 5 minutes before
transferring to a rack to cool completely. Share with a cookie monster, or a
friend, or both.
