Puhoi Cottage Tea Rooms

A two-week trip to Melbourne with a lack of internet access means that I haven't been blogging over the festive season (though I have certainly been drinking oodles of tea, and in fact received a bountiful amount of it for Christmas, hurrah!)... Back at home, life continues apace and it's back to work tomorrow... and it's a bit belated, but I do wish all of you the very happiest of New Years and hope that 2009 brings you all much joy (and tea, of course).

Looking through our photos from NZ with a friend the other day, I came across some that I took at the Puhoi Cottage Tea Rooms, where my husband and I stopped off one afternoon on our way from Paihia to Auckland. 

We had the best Devonshire cream tea ever – all the better for us  being extremely hungry at the time, too – fantastic scones and lovely tea in a beautiful setting, a closed in veranda of the house set in a lovely cottage garden complete with wishing well. 

There were a couple of cats wandering around and in and out of the tearooms as well, one of

 which looked very much like it had been getting too much cream for its own good, judging by its size! Both the cats were a bit shy but I still managed to get some photos of them too.

I saw a remarkable thing while we were there: the ‘Jolly/Sad teapot’ which I

 used to have until it broke, and which I’ve mentioned here. Not exactly the same one, of course – I think the one I had was a little smaller than this one – but the same pattern. Of all the places to see it! I almost asked if it were for sale, but decided that might be rude and settled for taking a photo instead…

Blending Tea

I have been having a lot of fun over the last few weeks trying to develop some tea blends of my own. These are mostly herbal blends because that’s what I feel most confident with – black and green teas seem so complex, and indeed it seems a shame to tamper with their own beautiful flavours sometimes – although I have had a go at a couple of black tea blends as well. I’m hoping that I may be able to start up a little tea business on Etsy sometime in the next few months but am trying to come up with a solid range of blends first before I get in over my head.

I don’t have access to the artificial or natural flavouring essences used to make regular flavoured teas so I’m confining myself to using the stuff I can buy at the herbal and grocery stores near me – although for the Christmas tea I have been trying to blend I did buy an almond flavoured black tea to use as the base (from The Tea Centre). This means dried fruits, spices, nuts, cocoa, vanilla and of course herbs like chamomile, rose petals and hips, spearmint…

It’s a funny process, trying to blend tea. Sometimes I seem to hit the nail on the head straight off - at least to my taste, and my friends who have tried the teas seem to like them well enough also (luckily!) – and sometimes things don’t work out like I was anticipating at all. Dried apple, for example, doesn’t add as much apple-y flavour as I’d thought it would, whereas dried apricots seem to work really well if you steep them for a decent period of time. Cardamom pods (crushed) have an extremely strong, almost overpowering scent – I really thought I’d gone overboard with the amount I put in - but when the tea is brewed the resulting flavour is quite subtle. I am curious to experiment with some shredded dried coconut…

The ideas come from a variety of places too. Some of them I just come up with on my own, but I’m also inspired – I do confess it – by blends that I read about in my beloved (but o-so-trashy) Tea Shop Mysteries… I own a couple of these and borrow the others from the library semi-regularly, not to re-read in their entirety but just to skip to the bits where they talk about the teas at the Indigo tea shop, and the catering that they do… and the recipes and tea party ideas at the end. It’s my little bit of escapist tea fantasy… Embarrassing but true.

I do wonder just how infinite (or otherwise) the number of possible blends is, though – at least for ones that will also be tasty. I was congratulating myself on being fairly original in coming up with the idea to try out a mix of fennel and lemongrass – then discovered at the café of the Embassy theatre in Wellington that there was a blend there that contained those two things (along with juniper berries, I think – wish I could remember the name of the brand of tea, I should’ve written it down…)! It seemed like an amazing coincidence. It also tasted pretty good – I think I will still try my own version.

Once the conference I’m going to is over and done with at the end of the week I am definitely looking forward to trying out more of my own tea blends, and will be taking careful note of the results for future reference… stay tuned!

Returned from New Tealand!

Well, New Zealand, technically, but I had so many very pleasant experiences with tea while I was over there that it almost did count as New Tealand, really.

While there were many highlights of our trip, most of them either nerdy (full day LOTR tours, anyone? Bliss!) or foodie (full day tasting tour in Martinborough and surrounds, plus many delicious restaurant meals) I will restrict myself to the tea highlights (tea lights? Hmmm) because those are what this blog is all about, after all.

It proved not very difficult at all to get decent loose-leaf tea in restaurants, particularly in Wellington where most places seemed to stock T Leaf Tea. The branding of this tea is very similar to T2 (black and orange) and they provide a similar range of products but also some that I hadn’t seen before, including quite a good range of single estate black teas and the best variety of beehouse (now known as ‘zero’) teapots I’ve seen – lots of different colours, so pretty! I would particularly like one in pumpkin orange…

One night in Wellington we went to Sweet Mother’s Kitchen, a place that serves really good deep-South of America type food, for dessert and tea. I was delighted to find that the tea itself (a raspberry and vanilla flavoured rooibos, very sweet and pleasant, not overpowering at all) was served in a beautiful blue-flowered Royal Albert tea cup, with matching plate. I am pretty sure that this picture depicts the pattern (it’s from an unnamed set matched with the pattern ‘Marguerite’, which I found thanks to this site.

Now I was also conscious of the need to sample some NZ biscuits, along with my tea, and on the matching plate which came with my tea at Sweet Mother’s Kitchen I tried out an afghan biscuit. These chocolate biscuits with chocolate icing on top seem to be very popular in NZ (there are also supermarket versions, though I skipped those in favour of trying out some Toffeepops, which were yummy). The one I had that evening was absolutely sublime. It had crunchy bits in it (which, after looking at some recipes online, I have deduced to be cornflakes or weeties), it was crumbly and buttery and chocolatey, and the icing was fantastic. Yet overall it wasn’t too sweet either. I am going to have a go at making some of these - here is one recipe, and here is another.

In Auckland, we went shopping to get my husband something nice at a men’s clothing shop called ‘Marvel’ (he bought a very nice striped top) – and I came away with, of all things, a teapot (the owners of the store appear to be collectors of vintage china, particularly Crown Lynn NZ made stuff). It’s a lovely deep sky blue glaze, cream coloured inside, and the most perfect pouring teapot I’ve had – not a drip! I will post a photo of it when I have a chance. So that absolutely made my trip, that’s for sure.

Another tea highlight was when we went out for dinner in Rotorua – we went to an Indian restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet, where we had the best Indian food I’ve eaten since leaving Melbourne last year (seriously). I ordered a cup of their chai masala tea, which was delicious – I think it had quite a bit of black pepper in it, it had quite a kick. I do like my chai with pepper, it always seems more exciting somehow than just with cinnamon and so on. I am going to have a go at blending some of my own at some point.

That’s all the tall tea tales I have time for today folks, but I will return. I have been having great success with iced tea, for example, and I have photos to post, and new teas to try, and many more things to rant about.