Tea time!

Enough with the coffee for a little bit and on to full-leaf tea. I've never baked with tea before and thought I'd give it a shot. Coffee's easy to bake with, it will pretty much be good in anything, but tea is a whole different animal and it's hard to tell whether it's going to be good as a cake or if you should just let it be tea.

Still debating this idea with Blueberry White Tea.

I started with a basic pound cake recipe (lots of butter, lots of eggs) and used full-leaf tea. Normally people will steep tea bags in milk and add it but I found that the full leaf tea really works. You can't just have tea leaves buried in your cake though so you have to find a way to infuse it into a liquid you'll use in the cake. Milk could work but you risk curdling the milk if you leave it on for too long. In this case, I melted the butter and the let the tea leaves steep there. Take it off the flame when the butter melts and let it sit like you would tea (normally about four minutes). Let it sit a little longer because you don't want to pour hot butter into your cake batter.

Strain the butter with a tea press or a tea strainer when it's cool enough.

You can definitely taste the tea in the cake but I'm starting to second-guess my tea choice for the cake. It could have even been the poundcake recipe I used, not one of the best. On the other hand, the home-made icing is perfect, and makes them look great too. Amazing what butter, powdered sugar and milk can do.