Do you love yourself some nice tea time? Make it even more delightful with desserts.
Just like wine, you can also pair tea with desserts because of its pleasant and complex flavor profile. Whether it's an afternoon tea or post-dinner tea, you can enhance its flavors by having it with a complementing or contrasting dessert. The key to choosing the perfect dessert or tea is to understand which notes and flavors work best with each other.
You'll find many combinations in this blog that help you understand how to pair your herbal teas with sweet and decadent desserts.
Matcha Tea with Vanilla Ice Cream
Matcha green tea has vegetal, grassy notes, a slightly bitter taste, and natural sweet nuttiness with a delicious savory ending called umami. Umami notes make matcha pleasant, and when paired with something sweet like vanilla ice cream, its bitter and savory flavors are enhanced.
You can make an affogato-like dessert, but instead of espresso, you pour hot matcha tea over the ice cream. Who can say no to that delicious dessert?
Lavender Tea with Shortbread
Sip lavender tea with delicious shortbread and imagine yourself at a fancy afternoon tea party in England. This combination is quite famous because both go so well without overpowering each other. Lavender tea has a calming effect with subtle floral notes; it doesn't need an elaborate dessert to wash off its flavor profile. Shortbread is buttery, rich, and equally comforting as lavender. You can also enjoy shortbread with other herbal teas.
Fruity Green Tea with Croissant
Croissant is often paired with coffee, but it goes well with fruity green tea too. The crispy flakiness and buttery flavor of a croissant make this tea's floral, tangy, and sweet notes taste wonderful.
Unlike regular green tea, its fruity variant has a sweet flavor profile, so pairing it with another sweet dessert will wash down its pleasant fruity notes. It's best to pair it with unsweetened pastry such as croissants.
Earl Grey Tea with Lemon Cake
Earl Grey is a flavored tea with citrus and floral flavor from bergamot oil. You can enjoy various desserts that go well with its bright, fresh, and distinct notes. Lemon cake with dark chocolate tastes even better when paired with Earl Grey tea. The citrusy notes from lemon cake and Earl Grey complement each other, and the bitterness from dark chocolate gives it a nice kick.
Chai Tea with Brownies or Pound Cake
People mostly drink chai tea because of its health benefits and unique taste. Chai tea is a black tea made with milk and some cinnamon and cloves, and this unique combination gives it a fascinating flavor profile with bitter notes and a subtle spicy kick.
Although chai is a form of black tea, the added spices make it a perfect drink for various intensely flavored desserts that you can't enjoy with other herbal teas.
Chocolate and spices harmonize with each other, enhancing the overall flavor. Drink chai tea with chocolate brownies if you're up for a bold pairing. But if you're looking for something more subtle, pound cake is another delicious dessert to pair with this tea. The dullness of a moist pound cake is perfectly balanced with the spices in chai tea. Dip the cake in the tea, and you're in for a comforting treat.
White Tea with Fruit Galette
Unlike other teas, white tea has a very mild flavor, and it can be tricky to choose the right dessert to pair with it. If you pair it with a sweet dessert, you may feel like you're drinking water and not tea.
Fruits like peaches are light and not intensely sweet when turned into a dessert, like a fruit galette, that works well with white tea. Fruit galette is like a tart but with a very thin crust with mild hints of sweetness. Make sure you don't use any intense fruits that will overpower the white tea.
Peppermint Tea with Chocolate Mousse Cake
There's no surprise here. You can never go wrong with the classic pairing of mint and chocolate. Peppermint tea has fresh and vibrant notes with a minty taste; it offers many benefits for health and has a healing effect. You can pair any chocolate dessert with peppermint tea, such as creamy and decadent chocolate mousse cake. This combination will turn any bad day into a good one.
ABM Tea with Gingerbread
ABM tea is a healthy herbal tea made with a mushroom called Agaricus Blazei Murill. This tea is recommended to help with many diseases such as insulin resistance, inflammation, hepatitis, etc. It also has a calming effect, making it a perfect nighttime tea to relax. ABM tea has earthy notes, so the best way to enjoy it is with gingerbread because these notes don't work well with sweet and creamy desserts.
Gingerbread has a vibrant flavor that isn't too sweet. You can also try flaky and savory desserts made with puff pastry with ABM tea.