Tea Cakes Recipe With Icing
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Follow this beloved Southern tea cakes recipe and in no time you’ll be enjoying pillowy soft and slightly sweet tea cakes with delicious frosting.
If you’ve never had a Southern tea cake, rest assured we sometimes call them cookies but they’re nothing like a cookie (nor are they similar to a ). This tender little cake is soft and pillowy, with just a touch of buttery vanilla sweetness. A very simple and comforting flavor. You can eat them with or without the icing. They are equally satisfying. If you are looking for the crispy variety, click here for my old-fashioned crispy Southern tea cake cookie recipe.
Tea cakes by Mama Reed are something I dearly love to bake. One of the main reasons (despite the flavor and texture) is that I like a lower-sugar snack. These tea cakes are perfect because they are not loaded down with sugar and super-sweet taste as most sugar cookies are. They are the perfect treat with an afternoon cup of coffee or as a snack. If you are expecting something really sweet, you’ll want to add the icing.
Mama Reed (Adle Reed was her given name) made these on a regular basis and the day she made them all 10 of her kids were allowed to eat as many as they wanted as they were coming warm out of the oven. With a shortbread-like texture, it’s easy to see why these tea cakes are total crowd-pleasers. I love to make them around the holidays as they’re the perfect Christmas cookie.
Recipe Ingredients
- Butter
- Sugar
- Eggs
- Vanilla
- Self-rising flour
How to Make My Southern Tea Cakes Recipe
Begin by placing the room temperature butter in a large bowl with the sugar.
Beat this with an electric mixer or until well creamed together and fluffy.
Now add eggs and beat again until well incorporated.
Dump in all of your flour and the vanilla extract. Mix again.
A nice dough will soon form from this .
Turn your dough out onto a floured surface.
I like to line my countertop with paper and flour so all I have to do is fold up the paper and there is no mess left behind.
Roll out the tea cake dough to about 1/4-inch thickness or so. You can make them a little thicker if you like.
Cut out your cookies.
Spray your baking sheet with nonstick cooking spray. Bake them at 350 until done, about 10 minutes or so.
Here are the finished tea cakes.
As soon as you take them out of the oven you can sprinkle a little colored sugar on them if you like, but do it while they are warm so it will stick.
Otherwise, follow along as we add icing to our tea cakes.
Tea Cakes Icing Recipe
Recipe Ingredients
- Confectioner’s sugar
- Vanilla
- Butter
- Milk
- Food coloring bottle
Place softened margarine or butter in a bowl and top with confectioner’s sugar.
Cut in your butter with a fork and then add the milk and vanilla. Stir that until smooth and creamy.
Add in food coloring if you like.
If it becomes too runny, just add another tablespoon or two of confectioner’s sugar.
First, make sure your cookies are completely cool before you add icing.
Then, spoon the icing on the center of your tea cake (this icing is also excellent on sugar cookies). Spread it around with your spoon and top with colorful sprinkles.
See how pretty these are? I feel like it’s my birthday or something (it’s not).
They are equally pretty with white uncolored icing as well.
Note: This icing is going to be very wet when you first make it and ice your cookies, but it will dry after an hour or so.
Just leave your cookies spread out to dry and once it does you can stack them in a cookie jar or on a plate.
Storage
- Store your cookies in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.
- You can also freeze either the unbaked cookie dough or the baked cookies for up to 3 months. You’ll just need to add a few minutes to the baking time for the unbaked cookies and simply thaw the baked cookies at room temperature.
Recipe Notes
- This tea cakes recipe can be used for any holiday or occasion. I like to use a round cookie cutter with a bit of a frill when there isn’t a holiday coming up and I have a craving for tea cakes. But you can use heart cutouts for Valentine’s Day, trees for Christmas, or stars for the 4th of July. The possibilities are endless for these little beauties.
- While these are a great treat with a cup of coffee for morning or , they also taste great served with fresh berries and/or a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
- Feel free to make this Southern tea cake recipe your own. Add some lemon zest to enhance the flavors. Or how about a 1/4 teaspoon of ground nutmeg? Another idea is a teaspoon of almond extract, lemon extract, or rum extract.
You may also like these other cookie and cakes recipes:
Heart-Shaped Cookies With Royal Icing
Ingredients
- 1 cup softened butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 3 eggs
- 3 1/2 cups self-rising flour
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Vanilla Icing (optional)
- 2 tablespoons butter at room temperature
- 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
- 2 tablespoons milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- few drops food coloring, optional
Instructions
- Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl with an electric mixer. Add the eggs and mix again. Then add the vanilla and flour and mix well.1 cup softened butter, 1 cup sugar, 3 eggs, 3 1/2 cups self-rising flour, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- Roll your cookie dough out thinly on a floured surface and cut with a cookie or biscuit cutter. Place on a cookie sheet greased with cooking spray. Bake at 350 for 10 minutes. Sprinkle with colored sugar while warm or ice with the vanilla icing.
To make the simple vanilla icing
- Cut the butter into the confectioner's sugar in a small bowl. Add the milk and vanilla and stir until smooth and creamy. If desired, add a few drops of food coloring and stir until blended.2 tablespoons butter at room temperature, 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar, 2 tablespoons milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, few drops food coloring, optional
- Spoon a small amount of icing into the center of each cookie and spread with the back of the spoon. Sprinkle rainbow sprinkles over the top while still wet and allow to dry for about an hour before stacking the cookies.
Nutrition
Oh Christy, that was a beautiful post. I have always tried to pass on what I knew about recipes on to my girls. The greatest part was when their friends would come over and they would get so excited telling them what I said!! Those cookies made my mouth water. With or without frosting. I also love a cookie that is soft and not so sweet.
I am a HUGE fan of Delsym. Even at the age my girls are, I still cant help but hover over them when they are sick. I guess you just never get past that as a mother. I hope you have a wonderful day!
P.S. Those BBQ sundaes from the previous post are genius! As a life long southerner I thought I had BBQ everyway you could but that was mouth-watering…I bet you guys had a fun day with that!!
Stephanie Hey! Thank you, that would be great!!! I appreciate all of the kind things you do for me!
Tina you know what is funny? We gave our son an old laptop but restricted it so that he can only access certain websites (he thinks its horrible that he can’t even use google!). This morning at six o clock he darts out of his room “Where are the tea cakes? I just read about them and I have to have them!”. I even quizzed him “Who used to make these? How many kids did she have?” He really had read this post well! LOL!
Thank goodness for Delsym! Your mother was much kinder than mind, at least she TRIED to make it taste better! LOL
Katie Oh I just love every time I see that name! I do hope you get to try these, they are so very different from what you are used to! thank you so much for taking the time to comment!!!
I hope y’all are having a great day!!! I’m off to my son’s school for a bit and then back home to try to catch up on replying to these great comments!!!
Christy 🙂
Those are SOOOOOO cute!! I LOVE serving teas, so I’m definitely going to have to make these!
These remind me quite a bit of my Grammy’s sour cream caraway seed cookies. They are thick, and bake up less sweet, and they were always flavoured with caraway seeds, although no one but me likes them because the seeds are hard. We also flavour with lemon extract or almond to mix it up, but they are not very sweet and hold shapes well so I use the dough to make shaped cookies.
Good Morning Christy, Those Tea Cakes are beautiful with or without the frosting. My oldest son would love these, he is a big sugar cookie fan he only loves sugar on them so i think this would be perfect and a nice change.
The cough syrup story made me laugh. When we were kids mother used to buy the vicks formula 44D IKES we hated it as kids she opened the bottle poured it into a pot and added lemon and honey and wared it up. Then poured it back into the pot and made us kids drink it!!!! ugh it was always hard to swallow even with all the lemon and honey. We always ran when we saw her pull that pot out and put that cough syrup on the counter. She also used to warm oil and then put it in our ear for a ear ache LOL i so remember that one. all kidding aside Delsym is the best i discovered it a long time ago its the one cough med my kids will take. I cant hold my kids down like mama did with the old vicks formula 44D, my mama must of been a strong lady LOL my kids can squirm.
Cool, good to know. Next time I do one of your recipes, I’ll go ahead and take pictures so I can post it, and then I’ll send people over here so they can buy your book! 🙂
I have to agree with your Granny Jordan’s review. That recipe was “very good.”
Hey Stephanie! That recipe was actually one of Granny Jordan’s. It was in her recipe box with “Very good” written on it. She used to always write a little review of each recipe along with the dates she made it and who she made it for. If Granny Jordan put “very good” on something, you knew it was a good one!
You are so considerate about posting the recipe but its really fine with me if you want to post things you’ve tried from the cookbook, but that is very sweet of you to fret over it! I’m pretty easy about things and you know how I am about sharing recipes! LOL
Christy
Those look wonderful! I know what I’m going to make the next time I’m hankerin’ after cookies (oh, now you have me typin’ like a southern gal)! And I’ll be sure to treat them very special, because they’re such special cookies.
I made the maple-mustard glazed chicken from your cookbook for dinner tonight (actually the recipe was for cornish hens, but I used chicken thighs). That glaze is amazing stuff! The chicken was fantastic, and we didn’t even turn the pan drippings into gravy like we usually do. We just spooned the drippings right over our mashed potatoes and used them to dip our bread! I won’t be posting it, I didn’t take pictures and I don’t know how you feel about people posting recipes from your book that aren’t on your blog. But I wanted to let you know that I tried the recipe and it turned out fantastic!