If anyone has ever had the pleasure, nay the privilege, of
entering my humble abode you will know that is filled with an array of
different teas. Whether it is colour, flavour, type or the country of origin I
can pretty much guarantee that I have that tea.
According to the Chinese Historical and Cultural Project tea
“is today’s most popular beverage in the world,[1]”
since its introduction to Europe in the seventeenth century tea was seen to be
a very expensive product and tea smuggling was rife especially amongst those
who could not afford the product that was worth its weight in gold. It seemed
like nobody could keep their hands off the stuff but why only drink it when the
tea can be used for so much more?
When first trying out a recipe I have been advised to stick
to it and adapt it later on when you know that it works, well I’m throwing
caution to the wind and the song goes ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.’
I probably will cry if it goes wrong.
The original recipe can be found here: http://www.lowfatvegancooking.org/?p=2213
My version is as follows:
Ingredients:
3 tsp green tea leaves I used Bancha Arashiyama a Japanese Green Tea available from the Tea House Emporium without additional flavours added to it but I wonder if using a different type
of tea, maybe a more flavoursome variety would change taste of the cupcake.
400ml Almond milk
60g Almond butter
Or alternatively 475ml of milk and no butter, I used Almond
because we had some in the house but regular milk and/or butter can be used
instead, unless you are vegan, then I would suggest a milk/butter of the nut
variety
160g Whole grain flour, you could use white flour but it
tastes more refined and contains less fibre.
1 tsp Baking Powder
¼ tsp salt
150g sugar
Boil the milk with the tea leaves for 10 minutes allowing
the leaves to infuse the milk. Strain, making sure to get as much of the liquid
out of the leaves as possible.
Cream the sugar and butter (if using butter, if not then
this a pretty useless step to have)
Add the vanilla extract and ¾ of the milk mixture to the
sugar as well as folding in the rest of the dry ingredients.
Bake in the oven at 180°c for 25-30 minutes
.
To make the icing, don’t do as I do and pour the icing sugar
into the green tea milk, it will never thicken. Instead mix a tsp of vanilla
and a tsp. of almond extract with 150g icing sugar and gradually add the green
tea milk.
To go with my almond theme (almond milk and almond butter) I
decided to put marzipan rounds on top of each cupcake before icing, it also added
a different texture to the finished cupcake. I didn’t add the marzipan rounds because
I had loads of marzipan left over from making Christmas cake and needed to find
a use for it, of course not.
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