Black Chocolate

I’m going to have a chocolate day today. I have a couple of chocolate tea’s and since I LUV CHOCOLATE I decided to drink them all in one day! Binge!

This has been my favorite chocolate tea. It’s rich and dark the way I love chocolate bars. The other thing I love about it is that the flavoring isn’t sour. I HATE SOUR FAVORING! But as I said, this tea is dark chocolate GOOD!

There’s a sweet little restaurant in town called The Chocolate Cafe.
I’ve taken the grandsons there one at a time for Italian Soda and Chocolate dessert. Lava Cake, Mousse, Creme Brulee to delight my little Princes http://flic.kr/p/cRDTWS. There is something magical about sitting in a lovely space, having a chocolate dessert served on a white plate that is decorated beautifully with berries or chocolate squiggles or powdered sugar, that’s far removed from picking up a cupcake at Whole Foods.
Flowers on the table, Italian Opera softly playing in the background and my little guys know that they are special to Grandma.

Chocolate is never casual like a cheese sandwich or jelly beans.

I made a pot of this tea for my morning wake-up and steeped it for 4 minutes.
My addition of cream and sweetening to this tea didn’t dilute the dark chocolate flavor but made it creamy and rich. It’s so good. I had forgotten how good. I’m totally out! I’ll have to call my son to send me more from the store at Pier 39!

I’m not sure if my tastes have changed, or perhaps the tea. But this, well it just tastes different. Certainly not like cake. Highly astringent, to the point of being downright sour. In fact, I could be convinced that this was some kind of lame attempt at lemon flavouring.
I’ll leave the rating as is, in honour of how spectacular my last batch was… but this one? well it’d get around 55.

Wow… I was in the mood for something creamy tonight and couldn’t decide what exactly I wanted. So I began to look through samples and I found this that seemed to meet my current criteria of “something creamy”. Special thanks to Indigobloom for sending me this to try!

It smelled deliciously sweet. In fact when I sniffed it I got a noseful of sweet followed by a hint of chocolatey goodness! By all means this was a good thing! My mouth was watering while I scooped out my teaspoons to steep it.

While it steeped, the steam smelled like a miny chocolate factory in my tea cup. The smell got stronger and stronger until it was finally time to sip it. Wow…. Creamy, chocolatey sweet, malty, slightly astringent, happiness in a teacup. With sugar added the chocolate flavor became more prominent and the maltiness was covered up a tad. Delicious. The only tiny flaw that it had was a strange chemical taste that lingered in the aftertaste. Other than that, it was great!

I believe that this is the best straight chocolate tea that I have tasted so far. They captured the essence of hot chocolate and made it blend in so well with the tea that I am sure that if milk where added it would be shockingly similar to the real thing!

I only wish I had more of it….. Oh well… You can’t always get what you want, but if try sometimes, you get what you need! ; )

More Traveling Tea Box tea!

There is a Spice and Tea Exchange in Asheville, NC? Really? I have read reviews for their teas, but pictured them only being in some exotic, distant locale, like California. LOL! But Asheville is in my state, though a good five hour drive away or more.

This is a far simpler tea than the Chocolate Chili Chai I just tried, but I really think I like it better. I am getting a nice Keemun flavor, which is already chocolatey, with the addition of some chocolate on top of that.

I try to drink all my tea plain, and I like this one sans additions. For those who add milk and sugar, I feel sure this tea would go over the top to decadent dessert tea status.

Very nice.

The last of this is being used for a little experiment. I have blended my last perfect teaspoon of this with a perfect teaspoon of Harney and Sons Vanilla black, to see what happens.
It increases the creaminess of the tea. Now that I think of it, why arn’t there more vanilla and chocolate blends?
Well, this is a sipdown for black chocolate. Sipdown!

First smell (dry) was awesomely chocolatey. On a second sniff, I noticed something a little smokey. Glance at package “Ah, it’s Keemun.”

Did a 2 1/2 min steep in boiling water. Color is red-brown, smell seems more leathery than chocolatey now. Tastes complex, lots of layered flavors. Malty chocolate with a kind of leathery, scotch-like background.

I dig it, but it’s probably not going to be a repurchase for me.

Tea of the afternoon…..

Thank you so much to Indigobloom for this one.

This is a really nice chocolate tea. The notes are of dark chocolate which I think works so well with a tea base that is not particularly sweet on its own. I think this would stand up to milk if you wanted to add some. Very good, and it is always good to know what else to buy when you are getting your fix of Coconut Oolong!

Usual Mug method.

My sweet wife took a trip to the Washington, D.C., area this weekend and I was unable to go. To make me feel better and missed, she picked up some teas by The Spice and Tea Exchange for me while she was in Annapolis, Maryland. Due to my insatiable sweet teeth (a whole mouth full of them), I naturally reached first for the Black Chocolate tea pouch this morning.

The moment I opened the small zip-lock pouch, a powerful and sweet dark chocolate aroma drifted from it. It smelled so good that I was ready to munch on the short black tea leaves without brewing them!

Finding some restraint, I steeped the leaves at 212 degrees for four minutes (no brewing instructions were on the pouch). A dark amber-colored brew was the result. A strong and inviting chocolate aroma floated from the tea pot.

The very first sip produced a full, sweet, and rich dark chocolate flavor. There was no need to search for the chocolate flavor. It exploded against my taste buds like Fourth of July fireworks.

All sips (and then gulps) after the first one remained consistent, smooth, and steady. The flavor was always sweet, chocolate, and delightful. There was no bitterness lurking in the taste, not even a hint of it in the dark chocolate. The black tea flavor was quiet and in the background. Chocolate was the indisputable star of the show.

The hot chocolate flavor of this tea was so luscious that I was tempted to drop a few marshmallows into it. I thoroughly enjoyed this selection at breakfast, but this blend must also be incredible at lunch or dinner for dessert.

This was my first experience with The Spice and Tea Exchange and it was a terrifically memorable one. If you love chocolate (and who doesn’t?) and are a sweet-a-holic like I am, you won’t be able to drink this tea fast enough…or just enough!

This is the flavour I expected DavidTea’s Super Chocolate to be! It’s a dark chocolate flavour with hints of black tea and definitely delightful. It was a great way for me to finish off dinner tonight!

This tea just tastes wrong. Maybe I just don’t like chocolate in tea. It’s just bad, and needs to go sit in the corner and think about what it did.

I can definitely see why some people may like it, but I am not one of them.