The making of our tea caramel has been quite the journey. Our idea was to initially create tea infused desserts, which involved playing around with many ingredients. To successfully infuse tea into desserts was not as easy as the recipes say. Excuse my ignorance, but no. One teaspoon of tea is not enough to call your cake an Earl Grey and Orange Cake. It is simply an Orange Cake, that happens to contain savourless traces of Earl Grey (insert frustration here!)
We found to be able to taste the tea, we had to use a fair bit of leaves. But it was not as easy as simply loading up the leaves into the batter. We had to infuse them somehow. We also had to be mindful of the type of sugar we used. As we were experimenting mainly with oolong tea, we found when mixed with white sugar, it gave the cake an artificial tea taste. One we would not rave about. Balancing these flavours was hard. So many types of tea flavoured icings were made, but none really captured the essence of the tea in the way we had hoped.
Until we welcomed our lightbulb moment to make a caramel that was infused with tea.
We took what we had already learned from steeping the tea in butter or cream. Our personal choice was steeping the leaves in cream as it gave a more delicate but well-rounded taste. We experimented with a cold brew method, but the flavour of the tea in the cream was basically non-existent. What worked best for us we found, was to gently heat the cream, then add the tea, and steep.
We want the tea strong enough that the flavour comes through, but not too strong where there is no way to counteract the bitterness. One of our biggest discoveries of this process is dang, tea can be a fussy ole thing.
But once we got it right, it was well worth the anguish. We tried many different techniques to make caramel. To find one that worked with our tea flavoured cream resulted in multiple trial and errors. If we heated the cream too long, it reactivated the tea and caused it to turn bitter. If it was not hot enough, then the cream would turn clumpy. What it came down to was months of testing different amounts of tea, at different temperatures, to find the right balance. It was that balance that was able to showcase the sweetness of caramel that complimented the flavour of our different teas.
We found ourselves venturing deeper into the rabbit hole of caramel, that we decided to make it our primary focus. So, we ditched the desserts and honed into creating a caramel that is a little bit different, but just as versatile.
