Gratitude Mints: Thé Series Vol. 1: Earl Grey Chiffon Cake

For volume 1 of Thé Series, I thought I would do some baking with tea. Incorporating tea leaves or infusing tea flavours into pastries and cakes had been very popular in recent years. I've had Matcha green tea cakes, earl grey cookies etc.

I'm not exactly a baker, as a matter of fact, I have never baked alone before (have always baked with friends), but was in the mood to bake so I decided to make use of some of the Earl Grey tea bags. I used the recipe from the Happy Home Baking blog. The recipe was quite simple (I specifically chose this recipe without using cream of tartar and other stuff I didn't have), and was quite easy to follow. I poured the tea leaves/ powder directly into the batter (as the recipe called for), but other recipes used Earl Grey infused milk. I would imagine that actual tea leaves would give a stronger tea taste, so decided to go with this.

The taste was a burst of earl grey (maybe because I used 3 tea bags), but was not sweet at all (complete lack of sweetness). The 'blandness' (I'd imagine) may have came from the bitterness of the tea leaves. I used Twinings' Earl Grey tea bags, which were considerably bigger than regular ones, so I might have put too much tea into it (bummer!). In order to save the cake, I decided to add a glaze on top. In the end, I made a Maple glaze to drizzle on top of the cake.

Adding the glaze was a correct decision, the sweetness of the glaze balanced out the slight bitterness of the earl grey. I would say that this is a successful first-time bake (proud!).

I'm also glad I nailed the texture of the chiffon, it was light, soft, 'cushiony', I almost couldn't believe that I actually made that!! (overwhelmed), that said, it started becoming slightly dry after a day (will have to improve on that). I think there the a very useful tip in the recipe: when whisking the egg whites, stop whisking JUST before it reaches a 'stiff peaks' consistency, and start incorporating it with the rest of the batter. This allowed the cake to be more airy and light, if you over-do the egg whites, the cake actually becomes more dense, or flattens when it cools (trust me, I've made this mistake before).

Try out this cake if you like Earl Grey tea and cake, then you must like it COMBINED!! An important tip is to use either more sugar in the batter or less Earl Grey tea leaves to make the cake sweeter, I would suggest the latter (let's try to stay on the 'healthier' side). If you don't want to do either, then you could add the maple glaze, here are the ingredients:

1/3 cups icing sugar

2 tbsp maple syrup

2 tsp milk (I used soy milk, same thing!)

Combine everything together until it is a smooth paste. Note that you may not need to add milk, just add a little at a time.

Here are some pictures of my baking process :)