This tea (the 10th tea in the 2013 Advent Calendar) has an allergy warning on it that it contains sulfites, which is isn’t exactly appetizing. I guess it’s just a food preservative, but all the same, I opted for just one cup of the Coffee Cake this morning.
The packaging says it contains black tea, along with preserved cherries, pineapple, and natural and artificial cake flavoring. When I opened this tea, it definitely smelled sugary, but it’s more of a burnt sugar creme brûlée scent than a coffee cake scent. In fact, after brewing, the sugar scent has some distinctive maple undertones, which is actually quite pleasant. I’d say the brewed scent is more akin to a stack of pancakes than a coffee cake.
While it smells like maple sugar, it doesn’t quite taste like it. The black tea is actually fairly strong in this blend, but it also has an oddly overwhelming fake butter flavor that carries a bit of a sugary aftertaste that quickly turns to a plasticky flavor. I don’t exactly find the butter flavor off-putting, but it’s not necessarily something that I will go out of my way to seek out in the future. I’m not sure I taste any pineapple or cherry in the blend, which is not surprising since there were only a few morsels in the tea to begin with.
