Salted Caramel Pancakes

The resteep was super delicious. Lots of toasted rice flavor. The first steep somehow wasn’t as impressive. I taste toastiness and a bit of caramel, but not as strongly. Still, I really enjoyed the combination of toasty flavor with salted caramel! It doesn’t seem like pancakes to me.

Homemade Advent Calendar from AJRimmer: Day 15

So many black teas in my advents today! I feel like the days have been feast or famine when it comes to caffeine… either everything’s caffeinated or nothing is. I’ve been trying to be smarter about my caffeine intake this year, because I’m pretty sensitive to it, but all that restraint has gone out the window this month. Oh well!

Anyway, here we have a fun pancake-inspired blend with toasted rice. Were you to transmute this tea into actual pancakes, I think they would be far too sweet for my tastes. Like… I’m not sure I actually want pancakes drizzled with salted caramel?! But as a tea, it works. There’s some definite caramel, and some sweet maple, plus lovely toasted rice notes. What I’m not getting is much salt, which is a shame — I think it would help balance this blend. A stronger black base might help, too.

Fun to try, and I bet it would be nice as a latte with some oat milk!

TeaTiff TTB #5

My husband and I polished this off with breakfast this morning. Though the inspiration sounded delicious, we found the actual blend to be more of a black genmaicha than anything else. Definitely got some maple flavor and some sweetness (maybe caramel?) but the popped rice flavor dominated the sip. Not a bad tea at all, but not quite what we expected based on the name.

TTB
This was more toasted rice popcorn than any other flavor to me. A bit of caramel in the background, and no salty taste at all. The second steep was a bit weaker, but still toasty rice. Interesting tea, glad I got to try it.

I really enjoyed this blend, it reminded me more of maple twist bread than pancakes but it was super yummy. I’m loving all the new teas I’m trying… I got overwhelmed by the advents so I sort of started ignoring them for a bit because I have more than ten days to catch up on and I decided to finish them in January.

middle of the road for me here. I’ve had this a few times now and it’s not blow your mind, but it’s not a bad little tea. Don’t need to restock it but i’m fine having purchased it. Kinda feels like a maple genmaicha more than a black salted caramel tea.

Sipdown! (19 | 149)

This was in my subscription box for January/February! I didn’t order any of the teas from Deb’s brunch collection, as I didn’t know which ones would be in the box and I’m trying not to buy tea anyway. It turned out to be this tea and Cereal Milk (yay!). I may have to order the Banana French Toast once it’s restocked, just because BANANA!

Anyway! It’s pretty good. I do think it does a good job of capturing both pancakes and caramel. There’s a strong maple note plus the graininess of the toasted rice, which together do remind me of pancakes with butter and syrup. But I do also get some darker, caramelly notes (plus the butter helps there as well).

Overall, it’s good, but I feel like the added ingredients to tea ratio is too high, as I don’t get much from the black tea. And because of that, it just ends up tasting very thin. So because of that, I don’t think I’d order this one. It was fun to try though!

Just received my Dessert by Deb sub box today, yay! And with it came my January order as well. So many goodies! This tea was on top, so it was the first I opened.

I hadn’t previously processed that this is a black tea with popped rice (like in genmaicha) – very interesting, and not a combination I’ve ever had, without green tea also in the mix. The popped rice kind of dominated the flavour, which I have mixed opinions on; I also picked up some saltiness and sweetness but it didn’t quite come across as salted caramel pancakes to me. I think this tea might require a bit more experimentation to get right.

Another sample snagged from Sil. Thank you!

Salted caramel is always appealing to me but I’m so off pancake teas that I decided to skip this one. Also I knew Sil was getting it and she’d let me try it.

The dry leaf smelled deliciously caramel. Drinking it though, it leans more strongly into the pancakes side of things than caramel. For me, that’s a plus because it means I don’t need to place an immediate order for more of this.

Now that I have had this tea a few more times, I do like it, but I am not sure if it is my favourite Dessert by Deb blend. I like the addition of the toasted rice in here – it gives it a crunchy sort of feeling. The bag also smells like the most delicious toasted caramel!

However, I think this tea is missing something. I think it needs a much stronger brown sugar and caramel presence. I also believe adding just the tiniest bit of sea salt to this would have really elevated it to the next level.

I also think a better name for this tea would have been, sweet and salty popcorn