Author: Michelle

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Fox Tea Club’s Coconut Milk Blooming Tea

Coconut Milk Blooming Tea by Fox Tea Club
White Tea / Flavoured
$15.95 for 2oz

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Fox Tea Club has provided me with Coconut Milk Blooming Tea for the purposes of providing an honest review.

First Impressions

I adore blooming teas – it’s a bit like a mix of tea and art together. For those new to blooming teas, the tea leaves and flowers are tied together and when you first get it the tea is just a ball. After steeping, the flower and the tea opens up and it’s a beautiful arrangement in your tea top. I would definitely recommend steeping all blooming teas in a clear glass teapot or cup to get the full effect.

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That said, Coconut Milk Blooming Tea came to me in sample packaging from the Fox Tea Club. I received one tea ball from them and it smells incredibly like coconut with a hint of floral. There is not much that I can see beyond the tea leaves and a hint of pink from the clover flower. The ingredients for the Coconut Milk Blooming Tea are: clover flowers, jasmine, white tea. The description of the tea also includes coconut flavouring, but the ingredients list (at the time of writing) does not.

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Preparation

Fox Tea Club suggests using 1 ball in a clear teapot and to steep using 180°F (82°C) water for 5 minutes. I followed the steeping instructions for the initial steep.

First Taste

After the 5 minute steep, the Coconut Milk Blooming Tea has opened up quite a bit. The tea itself has a warm pinkish tone to it, I believe that is from the pink clover flowers. The tea smells of jasmine and coconut, and just has a hint of sweetness to it.

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I’m pleasantly surprised at how good this tea taste. It has a soft floral taste to it that I’m attributing to the jasmine – it’s much more vibrant than other jasmine teas I’ve had before because it’s present rather than only being used to scent the tea. The coconut flavour is sweet and quite strong, it holds itself well against the strength of the floral notes from the jasmine. The sweetness is not over-the-top, and it’s just enough to make it interesting. I would think that most people wouldn’t feel the need to add any sweetener to this floral tea.

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A Second Cup?

Fox Tea Club suggests that the Coconut Milk Blooming Tea can be resteeped 3 to 5 times, which always makes me excited to hear because I love resteeping teas – you find subtle flavour changes from time to time. I used the same temperature water, and increased each subsequent steep by 30 seconds.

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For the first 2 resteeps, I found that the coconut flavour was a bit weaker than the initial steep, but it was still quite good. By the third and fourth resteep, I found that the jasmine flavour was considerably stronger than the coconut, as the flavouring of the coconut had started to become weaker. It still has a touch of sweetness though. I didn’t find my last (fifth) resteep to be particularly good compared to the other steeps, so for me the Coconut Milk Blooming Tea was good for a total of four resteeps (five steeps total).

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My Overall Impression

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I loved Fox Tea Club’s Coconut Milk Blooming Tea. Not only was this tea fun to watch while it steeped, it also tasted really good. The coconut flavours were sweet and balanced well with the floral notes from the jasmine. I enjoyed the fact that this tea resteeped well and the changes in the flavour were subtle with each resteep. It’s a fun tea, and I think that blooming teas are best enjoyed with company – especially people who’ve never seen a blooming tea open up before.

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An Afternoon Tea Party

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This past week, I had a small get together in my home for a few friends. I talk a lot about tea, so my friends know that I’m a bit of a tea enthusiast. When the idea of a tea party was suggested, I was like “Umm, yes!”. I am in no way an “expert” on hosting tea parties or afternoon tea, but I had a lot of fun from planning, shopping, decorating, and setting everything up. I shared a lot of photos in my Instagram Stories (@onemoresteep) on the day of and the days following, so I wanted to share some more photos – along with answering some questions that I’ve been getting about what was featured.

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I definitely went with an autumn theme. I did not break the bank on this one – I swear!

Each setting had a small, white pumpkin. I bought a bag of six at a local grocery store for $3.00. They’re just so adorable – one of my guests had the great idea of hollowing out her tiny pumpkin to fit a tea light. I had a couple leftover after the party and I gave one to my mom for her desk at work (she thought it was just the cutest thing).

My patterned tea set (consists of the teapot, sugar bowl, cream, four cups with saucers) was from Amazon by Gracie China by Coastline Imports in the Dahlia pattern. The full set is no longer being sold by Amazon, but you can still get the cups and saucers.

The silver rose teaspoons are also a purchase from Amazon, I love the floral detailing so much. I’ve had them in photos before on my Instagram account, I feel just a bit extra fancy stirring my tea with a rose teaspoon.

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The autumn leaves paper napkins and the red felt maple leaf are both dollar store purchases. One of my guests had seen the felt maple leaf at a big box store (and I saw them at a popular arts & crafts chain store) for a lot more – I paid $1.25 at a dollar store while the arts & crafts store had them for $8.99.

The 3 tier stand is glass and stainless steel and it was a purchase from Ikea (KVITTERA) for the low, low price of $12.99. I feel like I’ll put on enough tea parties in the future to make the purchase completely worth it. It can be taken apart to store flat (which was one of the huge pros to buying it). It’s a decent size too, and had enough room to hold enough food for four people.

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For the food, I put sandwiches at the bottom and at the top were the sweets.

Everyone got three varieties of sandwiches. All of them had an avocado-cream cheese mixture. The first was avo-cream cheese with cucumber; the second was the same as the first, just added shrimp; and the third was avo-cream cheese, tomato, and shrimp.

The middle tier was quiche – I had ham & cheese, and spinach quiche. The top tier was chocolate cupcakes.

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I opted to go fairly traditional with the tea, and I served an organic Earl Grey (from DavidsTea).

Not pictured are the goodie bags that I had for my guests as well. It was both an opportunity for me to share the love of tea and to destash some of my tea surplus. I have an amazing amount of tea, as one could assume, so I put together some goodie bags of both loose and bagged teas, along with some stainless steel infusers to make steeping the loose tea a little bit easier.

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DavidsTea’s White Chocolate Chai

White Chocolate Chai by DavidsTea
Black Tea / Flavoured
$8.98 for 50g

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First Impressions

I got a small bag of White Chocolate Chai at a local DavidsTea, their customer service representative told me that it reminded her of Cardamom French Toast – which I liked. The smell of this tea did remind me of Cardamom French Toast a bit, but the ginger is quite a strong player in the battle of the aromatics in this black tea blend along with the cinnamon. I don’t really get a lot of chocolate/white chocolate fragrances from this tea.

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White Chocolate Chai is made up of: black tea, ginger, cinnamon, cocoa nibs, white chocolate curls, cardamom, cloves, cocoa powder, stevia extract, natural and artificial white chocolate flavouring.

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Preparation

DavidsTea recommends steeping White Chocolate Chai in “near-boiling” water (194-203°F/90-95°C) for 4 to 7 minutes. I opted to do an initial steep of White Chocolate Chai for 5 minutes. I checked it at 4 minutes and could still see unmelted chocolate.

First Taste

White Chocolate Chai steeps to a warm brown colour, with a bit of an oil slick across the top (oils from the melted white chocolate). It’s a bit cloudy (again, because of the chocolate), and has a very interesting smell. I say interesting because it confused me at first and I couldn’t quite place it. There’s the warming aromas of the ginger, and I can smell the cardamom and cinnamon. The taste of this tea has mostly ginger, with a touch of the cardamom, cinnamon, and cocoa. There’s a hint of bitterness at the end of each sip. I found that most of the spices were well-balanced, besides the ginger that just edged everything out. The ginger has a bit of spiciness and heat, but it doesn’t seem to mix well with the black tea. Despite the white chocolate and the stevia, I didn’t find the tea particularly sweet. There’s the odd aftertaste from the stevia, which reminded me why I don’t usually use artificial sweeteners.

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I did try White Chocolate Chai as a latte and found that the addition of milk helped soften the ginger, but it didn’t do much to hide the artificial taste of the stevia. It was drinkable, but still had the artificial aftertaste of stevia.

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A Second Cup?

I attempted to resteep White Chocolate Chai and found it to be watery and didn’t taste at all like the initial steep. If possible, the stevia aftertaste is stronger in the resteep.

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My Overall Impression

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I didn’t like DavidsTea’s White Chocolate Chai. I really wanted to enjoy this one, because I love the idea of a white chocolate tea (because I love white chocolate). The unfortunate thing is that I didn’t like the stevia aftertaste – it just lingers quite a bit in the mouth and I didn’t like it. Despite the name, this black tea blend did not remind me of white chocolate or chai, which is quite unfortunate.

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