Baking and Tea
So I’m eating my freshly baked cake and drinking some tea and I find myself wondering how many of you out there like to bake? What do you drink with it?
I’ll go first! :D
I love to bake. I used to do tons of baking, but it was super unhealthy so I stopped. Now, I only make stuff on special occasions to take to parties. My husband is much saddened by this and feels really possessive of everything that comes out of the oven. Today, I have an oddly insatiable sweet tooth. It’s crazy because I rarely crave sweets. I’m a salty snack kind of person.
So anyways, I was sitting here dreaming about cake and my husband tells me the avocados need to be eaten real soon. Somehow this mashed together in my mind as avocado cake. So I googled a recipe and replaced the butter with extra avocado and now I have this tasty green cake with some tasty cold brewed sencha from Den’s. Perfect combo.
Husband is also happy. Pups are sad because they’re not allowed to eat avocado.
Your turn!
Also, I found this recipe and I totally want to make it!
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2012/08/sticky-malt-loaf-recipe.html
There’s tea in the ingredients! Now I just need to find some malt powder….
I’m not so big on baking, but I do like to bake cupcakes. And that’s a good thing since I’ll be making 144 of them in three weeks or so for my daughter’s wedding. I’m making the wedding cake (which is actually a cupcake tower)
And, of course, I love to drink tea with my cupcakes! I usually prefer black teas with baked goods.
Ooh! Congrats on your daughters wedding! What kind of cupcakes will they be?
I’m making six different flavors: Vanilla, Chocolate, White Chocolate Raspberry, Banana, Strawberry and Lemon. All the frosting will be vanilla frosting, though. It will be an outdoor wedding (in the park) so I need to make a frosting that will hold up in the heat.
Each of the cupcakes will be decorated with edible glitter, edible pearls, a little edible butterfly and a little edible flower. It’s going to be adorable!
I made these yesterday for a tea party, and they were DELICIOUS:
http://221bakinggeeks.tumblr.com/post/25037299540/dazzamre-221bakinggeeks-arthur-shappeys#notes
(If you scroll to the bottom there’s an American measurement system, and that’s the one I used)
That looks tasty! I think I’d pair a black or rooibos/honeybush with these cookies. What teas did you have at the tea party? I tried to have a tea party once. I made scones and green tea mochi cake and quiche. My friends just wanted orange juice. :(
We’d all just bought a bunch of Cara McGee’s Sherlock teas: http://adagio.com/sherlock/index.html (it’s sad that I can type that web address in without having to look it up). I think combined we had Watson, The Mind & The Heart, The Woman, Reichenbach Recovery and Mycroft.
But yeah, the honey flavor in these cookies was great. They went really well with Mind & The Heart, which is Irish Breakfast, berry blues, and rooibos vanilla chai.
It’s a shame about your tea party! That tea cake sounds delicioussss
The Woman is one of my favorite episodes. :D Those teas look so fun!
Here’s the recipe I used for the Mochi cake:
http://weekofmenus.blogspot.com/2010/07/green-tea-mochi-cake-living-with-regret.html?m=1
I just made a yummy tea cake made with Mocha Matcha from Red Leaf Tea. It isn’t too sweet, which I like. Here is the recipe I used: http://www.matchasource.com/Matcha-Tea-Cake-s/84.htm.
homemade pumpkin bread with stash tea pumpkin spice. i have to hide this and not tell anyone i baked it. i put it on facebook once that i was making it and both my boys my sister and my neice were calling me for it. so now make and bring it out for thanksgiving dinner.
Haven’t been baking anything lately since it’s been so miserably hot. Poor AC is already struggling. I tend to do things with lemon, coconut, chocolate or raspberry to have with tea. Not sure why that is. Could be my tea parties just follow patterns in the foods I make or could be that I’m unconsciously steering towards things that go well with the teas I serve. I’d like to think it’s the latter, but I’m probably just predictable. :)
We had a strawberry herbal last time that seemed to go well with the coconut poppy seed cake. And the chocolate cherry scones went excellently with Paris (though in my mind, Paris goes well with any pastry type of baked good). Rosemary Lemon cookies went very well with the jasmine green.
And I love shortbreads with my black teas!
It’s not been miserably hot here in NY so much as it’s been miserably humid! Ugh. Humidity is terrible for my hair and skin.
I love the flavor combos in your baked goods! Sounds amazing! coconut poppy! And the tea pairings sound great too!
Shortbreads are good with everything. But oh man, all that butter! eep!
I think I need to experiment. Avocado doesn’t have a very strong taste on it’s own – more a texture. Wonder how shortbread with some avocado subbed for some of the butter would work…
I can definitely taste the avocado in the cake but in a tasty way. I suspect avocado might make shortbread a bit too moist since it does have some fiber and water content. Wouldn’t hurt to try though! a soft cookie is still tasty!
I looove baking with tea, but I have two cookies on my list to make that I would prefer to keep tea-free and just DRINK tea with! haha
An amazing snickerdoodle recipe, and an orange creamsicle cookie! :)
I forsee the snickerdoodles going VERY well with some Verdant teas on my shelf ;)
Edit: scratch not using tea in this recipe haha – I’m out of vanilla extract (it was such a giant bottle!) so I’m going to make a very strong chai concentrate to add instead!
I totally thought about you and your blog when I made this topic. :)
I personally love snickerdoodles with chai. I once made pumpkin snickerdoodles for Thanksgiving. It’s crazy how many people how no idea what a snickerdoodle is. They are so tasty! I imagine some lemon zest would be good in snickerdoodle if you didn’t have a vanilla.
Ohh great idea! Just a little lemon kick with the cinnamon would be really really nice.
It’s true, a lot of people have never fallen under the love spell of a simple but addictive Snickerdoodle <3
I looove snickerdoodles. I am toying with the idea of making up a couple batches to share at my wedding…they’re just so delicious!
I toyed with the idea of making my own wedding cake for my wedding cause these cakes are about $6 per person in NYC if you are lucky. but I had so much else to worry about I decided to just buy the darned thing for about $600. If you can manage to make cookies for your wedding I would be in awe of you. Snickerdoodles would be cute wedding favors though!
That’s pretty much where I’m at, Mercury. It will be a relatively relaxed country wedding but I doubt I’ll want to worry about snickerdoodles! If it calms me down, we might get some as a bonus but I don’t want to plan on it and feel obligated. Luckily I have a family member who makes gorgeous cakes so I don’t have to worry about it as much. She does them by herself so the price is much lower than bakeries. : )
I tend to turn out quite a bit of biscotti every year. Mostly around Christmas time, but it’s not too uncommon the rest of the year. Different kinds, which are basically just me attempting to customize the basic recipe. Triple chocolate, cranberry with white chocolate, orange, walnut, etc.
Otherwise, I’ve made Russian tea cakes, basic tea biscuits, scones, and some finger-sized pies.
Most just end up paired with black or flavoured teas.
I make cookies and quick breads, but my specialty is pies! However, I don’t make pies that often as it is a lot of work!
I would like to incorporate tea into my baking – I tried twice on cookies and both didn’t go well. Both recipes had me spice grinding the tea and both tasted bitter or too strong.
For pairings, more often I’d be eating cookies or pies for dessert so at that time I cut myself off caffeine, more often I’m drinking a rooibos, like Davidstea’s Creme Brulee or Oh Canada.
When I make muffins or quick breads in the morning, I’d often go for a black tea.
Pies! I love pies! But the crust is indeed hard work. This is why I take the lazy way out and make cobblers. :D
For tea infused cookies, try this:I usually steep very, very strong in whatever liquid I am using. I have had good luck doing this with cakes, but have never tried it with cookies, I’ll admit.
Seems like the butter infusion method would add tea flavor but once you melt butter you have changed the molecular arrangement and it will then behave a bit differently when used in a recipe. Melting butter before using it in recipes is a step towards having clarified butter, which removes the milk solids and can change the flavor depending on for how long you cook the melted butter. http://www.joyofbaking.com/ClarifiedButter.html
If you aren’t making shaped cookies and especially if you are making bar cookies, then infusing by melting and resolidifying the butter will probably have no appreciable difference in taste. If making shortbread or something heavily butter dependent, though, I’d still look into steeping in the liquid or possibly steeping the tea in water for not as long as called for to make a cuppa and then chopping it finely to use in the recipe. Maybe that would impact the bitter taste?
Now I need it to cool down outside so I can try some of these methods, myself!!! :)
Scones I find go real well with earl grey, and they’re quite easy to make. You can make plain scones, but I enjoy experimenting with all sorts of different fruits and berries and other flavours. I even infused some loose leaf earl grey into the scones themselves.
I once made blackberry cherry scones. They looked terrible because the juices made the scones all mottled with blue and pink. It looked like they were covered in mold. Fortunately they tasted great! And my friends enjoyed them after they found out why they were so ugly. :D sticking with drier fruits or neutral colored ones from now on!
Scones really are great with darker teas. :) also can’t beat scones with preserves! Yaay scones!
If you roll the fruit lightly in flour first and mix them in really quickly you can prevent the colors from “bleeding” and making your scones take on that gross purple-y color. It works really well with blueberries and cherries, I’ve never tried it on blackberries but I assume it would be the same!
I always use frozen berries in my scones and muffins and they never bleed, that’s a good trick too! (I use fresh berries and just flash freeze them for a few hours before baking)
anyone know how to make them turn out less dry? I follow the recipe and all that but they always turn out like that.
Dry or tough scones are usually from over-mixing. Scone batter is pretty temperamental and stirring it too much will activate glutens in the flour. Thus why you want to make a “well” for the wet ingredients and mix really fast! If that doesn’t work, perhaps more liquid in the batter?
Thanks for the tips guys! I’ll try them next time!
Pekeo1, what recipe are you using? Maybe try a different one? I like the recipes from this blog:
http://www.joythebaker.com
She’s a great personality and her scone recipes are great! In general though, if your scones are too dry, I’d say add more of whatever liquid you are using.
Good luck!
Also, I agree with Alphakitty. gotta work fast and handle the dough as little as possible! Also, bake it as soon as it’s mixed because wet flour will naturally start forming gluten strands even without mixing. Mixing speeds up the gluten formation though.
If your scones are still dry, just toast it, spread butter and preserves all over it and it’ll be just as awesome. :D
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