Baking with tea flavors, like Lemon Verbena, is a great way to elevate any dessert recipe. There’s an art to tea-infused baking. Read on to learn how to infuse cakes with tea flavors.
The best way is to use strong loose leaf tea and steep it in unsalted butter or milk, which will infuse the cake with the tea’s fragrance. You can make a tea-infused butter to use in your recipe instead of the normal butter. Or you can boil your milk with tea. Or you can use both, for even more flavor!
We suggest using ourTeas & Trees Luisa tea which has a strong citrus smell.
You will have to use slightly more butter than usual. It will vary depending on the type of tea that you use and how good you are at pressing the butter out of the wet tea leaves. A good rule of thumb is 2 grams or approximately 1 1/2 teaspoons of whole-leaf tea per tablespoon of butter.
Instructions:
- Melt the butter (or the milk) in a saucepan and set over a low heat
- Add the tea leaves
- Continue heating the mixture for about 5 minutes
- Remove from the heat and allow to cool for another 5 minutes
- Pour the mixture through a fine sieve, pressing hard on the tea leaves and then discarding them. Some of the liquid will have evaporated and some will get lost in the tea leaves, but you should still have most of the butter or milk mixture left
- Let the mixture come to room temperature and then use it as you would regular butter or milk in your baked goods
Enjoy your tea-infused cake! We’d love to see your creations. Post a photo and tag us on Instagram, @teasntrees!
