Cooking with Tea

A while back I borrowed Eat Tea from the library, and managed to make a couple of the recipes before I needed to return it... although I really need to borrow it again so I can copy some of them down.

I convinced my husband to put his ice cream maker to use to make the Vanilla Tea Sherbet, which is a combination of strong-brewed vanilla black tea, sugar and buttermilk (we used my Vanilla Basic Black, which you could win some of - along with a couple of my other teas - here!)... delicious and refreshing, not too sweet, not too creamy... although my sister thought it tasted like cough medicine. All I can say is, I wish that I'd ever had cough medicine tasted like that.

Here's the process in pictures -

The ingredients:

The mixture:

The end result (well, what was left of it):


I also made the green tea and ginger tea bread (no photos, sorry, it all got eaten before I remembered to take any, though I suppose that's a good sign), a sweet eggy tea-loaf with sencha, candied ginger and lemon zest in it - the lemon and the ginger could have been a little stronger in flavour, but it was very tasty nonetheless, and looked pretty cool too - the little flecks of ground-up sencha were very attractive.

And then today, feeling at something of a loose end with nothing specific on my schedule I decided to make these little Earl Grey Tea Cakes... super-easy recipe, and it worked perfectly with only one egg instead of two (I only had one and couldn't be bothered to go to the milk bar to get any more). Naturally I used proper loose-leaf Earl Grey... almost the last of my supply, soon I will have an excuse to go and buy some from Lupicia. The tea leaves made pretty flecks in these small cakes as well.

Here they are before being iced...


... and after:


I had one of these with a pot of Earl Grey... but I think they would also go very nicely with some second-flush Darjeeling or rooibos too.