Almond Tarragon Sandwich Cookies

As I am starting to develop my blog, I am looking for desserts that are a little more complicated than your average chocolate chip cookie. Right now I have enjoyed finding an ingredient in my house and then coming up with a recipe to use it in. Sounds easy enough. Well, what if that ingredient is fresh tarragon? That's right, tarragon, like the herb. I was first inspired to use our fresh grown herbs in my Lemon Basil Blueberry Cupcakes. However, as you can guess, using basil in baked goods is far more common than tarragon. In fact, when I went online to look for a dessert recipe with tarragon, I only found one. It was a Slovenian Pastry, so while I am adventurous, I thought I had better try something different. It looked like I would be coming up with my own recipe. Normally this isn't too hard, but I forgot to mention one little thing. I don't even know what tarragon tastes like. So for starters, I went and picked some and smelled it. For some reason, it immediately reminded me of the smell of almond extract. I decided to use it in an almond sandwich cookie and I also added some lemon juice. If anything, I figured the lemon would help detract from the tarragon if the taste was terrible. However, luckily for me, these turned out fabulous! As if this wasn't enough of a challenge, we also had no eggs in the house, so my search began by looking for an egg-less almond cookie. After some major adaptations, here's what I came up with!

COOKIE
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup almonds
3/4 cup flour
1/3 cup powdered sugar
1 tbsp. finely chopped fresh tarragon
1/2 cup butter softened
2 tsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. almond extract

FILLING
5 tbsp. butter softened
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
4 tsp. lemon juice
4 tsp. water

Preheat the oven to 360 degrees.

Finely chop the almonds into a flour like mixture using a hand chopper. Add the flour, salt, powdered sugar, and tarragon. Stir well before adding the butter, lemon juice, and almond extract. I mixed with my electric hand mixer until just combined and then used my hands to form it into a ball. Next I made 18 small, slightly flattened balls out of the dough and baked for 16 minutes.

Combine all of the filling ingredients and mix with an electric mixer. Wait for cookies to completely cool before making a sandwich cookie with the filling in the middle.

This makes 9 small sandwich cookies. I was a little skeptical to make too big of a batch (and I only had 1/4 cup almonds). However, it could easily be doubled or tripled.