Time for....some tea inspired baking with Piacha tea

Hello there,

Welcome back to Tea With Me and Friends - we hope you're having a tea-riffic day.

Today I am sharing with you a little recipe that made me very happy. You may remember that we discovered the fabulous tea from Piacha a while ago - Pia has so many delicious blends on offer, but Black and Cherry is one of my favourites. It's a sweet tea, that I find very refreshing. For ages now I have been trying to include this tea in my baking - always focusing on cakes. But they always fail - with hardly any flavour carrying through to the cake.

Tonight however I decided to try something different - I had seen teabag shaped biscuits all over the Internet (Ok - mainly on Pintrest....the place I seem to spend most of my time!!) and it struck me that maybe I could include Black and Cherry in a biscuit. A lot of the teabag biscuits I came across were flavoured with green tea (often using Matcha powder) but then I came across a couple of recipes which included earl grey tea. After doing a bit of research about whether you can actually eat tea leaves, I decided to give it a go and worked on a recipe using the Black and Cherry tea leaves.....and I'm so glad I did....

Black and Cherry tea bag biscuits
from Tea With Me and Friends

These biscuits are light and crisp and have a beautiful cherry flavour that will make you smile. Plus, they are super simple to make!

You will need:

1.5 heaped tablespoons of Piacha Black and Cherry loose leaf tea

130g plain flour

50g caster sugar

20g icing sugar

100g unsalted butter

splash of water

100g chocolate - optional

A straw for poking holes

Bakers twine (or other thread)

This will make: 16 teabag biscuits

Preheat your oven to:

200c or 180c (fan oven)

To make the biscuits:

• First you need to grind up the tea leaves as small as you can - either in a food processor, with a pestle and mortar or like me in a bowl with the back of a spoon.
• Now combine all your dry items (so that's the tea leaves, flour and both sugars) in a bowl, mixing them well
• Next you need to add the butter - rub this into your dry ingredients so you end up with a bread crumb like mixture. Don't worry if it starts to combine together at this stage,
• Now add a splash of water and carrying on combining the mixture to make a dough. At this stage less is definitely more - you don't want a sloppy dough
• It's time to chill your mixture - this is important to stop the dough expanding when baking in the oven. Roll your dough out, wrap in cling film and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
• Once chilled, we get to the fun part - making the teabags! First put flour on your clean work surface, then roll out the dough until its about 0.5cm and then cut out your little teabag shapes. I used a straw to make the hole at the top of each teabag.

Use a straw to poke holes in the top of your biscuits

• Once you've cut all your teabags, place them onto a cold baking tray and place in your preheated oven for 12 minutes or until the edges of your biscuits turn a golden colour.
• Remove your biscuits from the oven and allow to cool

Tea bag biscuits in the making!

• Once cool you can thread your twine through the holes in the top and dip your biscuits in melted chocolate. Don't forget if you go down the chocolate route you'll need to leave the biscuits to dry before you can tuck in.
• Enjoy with a cup of tea!

Teabag biscuits....perfect with a cup of tea!

To be really honest these biscuits don't really need the chocolate dip - the light cherry flavour is sweet enough. However, if you do add the chocolate it doesn't ruin them either!

These biscuits make a lovely gift for a tea loving friend.....or just gobble them all up yourself (like I did!).

I'm sure this simple recipe will work well with other tea leaves, so if you don't have any Piacha tea at home why not experiment with your favourite tea - just remember to grind up your leaves! If you try a different tea yourself, we'd love to hear what you baked - leave us a comment or send us a photo!

To find out more about Piacha teas and the fabulous tea bar in London pop by the Piacha website!

Thank you for popping by today,

Rachel