Fruit tea loaf

          A while ago I was told about a recipe for earl grey cupcakes.  I’m not really an earl grey fan, but I do like the odd cup of lady grey tea, odd being the operative word here, because I still add milk.   I’ve found a couple of fruit teas I like, no milk here though, and thought it would be a good idea to try to flavour the cupcakes with those instead of the earl grey.

          I couldn’t find the original recipe I’d been given so googled it (good old Google).  The recipes I found all said to infuse the teabags into the milk and add the earl grey flavour that way.  Ok, I’ve got a recipe for “American Style Muffins”  which are made with milk so off I went, I measured my milk and heated it slowly in a pan with two rhubarb and blackcurrant tea-bags.  The plan was to then cool the milk and add it cold to the muffin mixture at the right time in the recipe.

          Plans … I should know better.   The fruit in the teabags curdled the milk.

          A few nights later during lunch at work, we chatted about the curdled milk and compared a few other recipes which might work.  In the end it was agreed that adding the fruit tea after the cake was cooked would be a good way to prevent the milk from curdling and I dug out my old recipe for “Lemon Drizzle Cake“.

          Again with the help of Google I found out that one lemon gives off approximately three tablespoons of juice so if I make a really strong cup of fruit tea I can use three tablespoons of it to replace the lemon in my cake, but … and here’s a good bit too, the rest of the tea I can mix with icing sugar and add an extra twist to the top of the cake.

          Now all I have to do is decide which fruit teabag I’m going to use.