Baking With Tea

Tea and pastries are a time-honored combination. What’s better that a hot cup of Earl Grey in the morning with a nice cinnamon scone? However, incorporating tea into your pastry recipes adds a nice touch of elegance and flavor. Next time you’re looking for something interesting to bake for your pastry courses online, consider baking with your favorite tea. The most popular way to incorporate the flavor of your favorite tea into your baked goods is to infuse the butter used in the recipe with loose tea.

How to infuse butter
When you learn to infuse butter with tea, the possibilities are limitless. Simply melt however much butter your recipe calls for, plus a little bit extra, in a sauce pan and add the tea leaves. Melting more butter than you need is necessary because the tea leaves absorb some of it. This is most effective if the tea you use is strong and aromatic and the butter is unsalted. Heat the butter for about five minutes, and then turn off the burner and allow it to stand for another five minutes. Strain the leaves out of the butter and try to squeeze as much butter as you can out of the leaves. Allow it to cool off to room temperature and use it in your favorite baked goods!

Tea-infused baked goods
With so many teas out there, it can be hard to determine what kind works well with whatever you’re baking. Until you determine what teas work best for you, here are a few recipes for you to practice with:

• Chai cookies: Chai is a sweet mix of spices like cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and pepper with black tea. This tea is ideal to bake with, as it’s strong enough to lend a decent amount of flavor to these cookies from The Kitchn.
• Berry and jasmine scones: These scones from The Kitchn actually incorporate the aromatic jasmine tea leaves into the dough by grinding them very finely. Jasmine has a light, floral flavor and isn’t strong enough to steep in the butter.
• Earl Grey madeleines: Similar to the berry and jasmine scones, these madeleines from Food52 also use fragrant tea leaves ground to a fine powder in the recipe. Earl Grey is a classic tea typically served with honey and pastries. However, these madeleines combine all three of those things!
• Vanilla rooibos cookies: The great thing about vanilla rooibos tea is that its natural vanilla flavor keeps it from needing much additional sweetening. These cookies from Food52 are subtly sweet and prepared in the form of a log that you can keep in the freezer, slice and bake at your own leisure.
• Lady Grey biscotti: Lady Grey has more of a citrus flavor than Earl Grey, making it the perfect tea to incorporate into these white chocolate biscotti from The Telegraph. The recipe calls for some more orange zest as well, making these biscotti light and refreshing – perfect to eat with some citrus or black tea.