So, my mum is running a high tea soon and needed suggestions for pass-the-parcel gifts (because OBVIOUSLY this is a thing you do at high tea!), and being the practical sort of person that I am (!) I suggested…. tea? š There’s a local place that sells individual sachets for $1.50, which is a great way to sample a range of flavours and I love it (and sometimes these lil individual sachets make their way into things like Fan Kits, just saying…).
But THEN Mum said that she also needed a gift for the middle of the parcel, so we googled T2 (a really fab Aussie tea company, based in Melbourne) and lo and behold, they had some amazing sales on. Soooo I went to T2 to grab some things for Mum and oops my hands slipped and I ended up with more tea for myself? Oh no? The world is ending? O:)
The cubes were on sale, buy two get one free, so I grabbed another of the Blueberry Crumble that the kids got me for Christmas – it’s a limited edition and it’s DELICIOUS, now one of my favourites, so that was an obvious pick. I also grabbed more of the Crazy Good Cocoa, which is literally just cocoa bean husks. They used to be quite chunky, but the seem to be processing them a bit finer these days, which I like, because it seems to give a stronger chocolatey flavour. It’s not great drunk by itself, but I use it to add to everything from Turkish Delight, to the already-a-little-chocolately Mint Slice, to a cherry flavoured tea to make chocolate cherry. Yum!
And I also grabbed some of their Singapore Breakfast tea, which is a really unique tea I fell in love with when I got my T2 advent calendar in December last year. It’s a black tea with toasted coconut and rice puffs and, well, here, read the ingredients for yourself,* but it’s warm and soothing and a little bit sweet but in a warm and toasted kind of way, not a fruity or floral or sugary kind of way, and it’s just really delicious.
*Spoiler, not as helpful as I’d expected. That’s the one thing: T2 have really, really, really delicious blends, but they do use a lot of added flavouring to achieve that.
ALSO I grabbed one of their Tea Stash tins, which has 20 individually wrapped tea bags in 20 different flavours (which is what Mum is going to use for the layers of the pass-the-parcel), because OMG THEY WERE ON SALE FOR $15. And I’ve discovered (oddly enough) that it’s way easier to use bags at work than loose leaf, so they have gone to work to be my tea stash (literally, ha) there.
Also-also, apparently tea is a massive hit with high-school students? IDK, I didn’t come from a tea- or coffee-drinking family so I could be wrong, but I swear when I was in Years 10 – 12 in the early 2000s teenagers were not in love with tea like the current generation is š Which, I am A-OK with this, because it’s an excuse to take the contents of my tea cupboard in every so often and share with a grateful audience, ha. (And look, I have approximately a billion and three flavours of tea right now and I only drink it 3 – 4 times a week*, so we might as well all benefit before the tea goes stale.)
*I’d like to drink it more but tea, being a leaf, is super high in salicylates, one of my main/most annoying food intolerances, so I have to ration it. I’m currently trialling super-high doses of fish oil though as a way of managing the salicylate intolerance symptoms, based on some early research that’s come out, so we’ll see how that goes? It takes 6 – 8 weeks to take effect, and I’ve been on it for what, 3 weeks maybe? But already I feel like I’m not coughing at cold air as much as I was prior to taking it, so…? Hopefully the results will be positive?
Also, I feel like I want to institute a ‘What I’m Drinking This Week’ kind of thing here? We’ll see. I have lots of things I want to institute in my life and maybe like 15% of them actually ever get implemented :’D but we’ll see.
So, this week I’m super into:
– my cherry-flavoured black tea that I’ve added cocoa husks to (a surprise contender, I’ve always been a bit meh about this one so far, but it was on a run-out sale once so I have heaps of it, so it’s good that I’ve finally decided that it’s ‘in’, :’D )
– this chocolate truffle rooibos, with added extra cocoa husks, because it’s warm and sweet and delicious (and caffeine-free, if that matters to you)