Roselle Hibiscus Tea 洛神花茶

Nothing like a drop of tea, eh?  And even better, a drop of tea infused from flowers!  This beautiful tart and refreshing tea is made from dried flowers, specifically the dried Roselle of the Hibiscus flower genus.  I discovered this flower while researching for an ice cream that I want to make (as the weather grows warmer the desire for luscious ice creams increases, no?)  

After locating dried roselle 洛神花 at my local Chinese herb/spice shop I brewed myself up some Roselle Hibiscus Tea 洛神花茶.  Oh my oh my, what a tea: truly a gorgeous red color, gleaming and sparkling, with a most refreshingly tangy and fruity flavor!

Butterfly Pea Flower Drink 蝴蝶豌豆花茶

Goshdarnnit, it's been so hot these days.  Not only in HK but everywhere...sigh.  No fear, HK Cookery to the rescue, here's a refreshing and beautiful drink for you to revitalize your body from the heat!

Are you not tempted?  Isn't this Butterfly Pea Flower Drink 蝴蝶豌豆花茶 just the most sublime color?  Just looking at it makes you feel a bit cooler, no?  This totally natural color is from the amazing butterfly pea flower 蝴蝶豌豆花.  This little blue flower provides color, is packed with antioxidants and is said to work as a mood enhancer, busting the stress and anxiety right outta your life.

Chrysanthemum Flower Tea Jelly 菊花茶凍

Like  a moment frozen in time, so does this little jelly capture the beauty of the delicate chrysanthemum flower.  This little dessert is a riff on the classic relaxing and rejuvenating Chinese Chrysanthemum Tea (click link to check out how to brew some!) which is beloved by young and old.  

For myself, the joy of the chrysanthemum tea has always been the fact that flowers, yes! actual flowers, are used in the tea.  Dried, twisted and wrinkled flowers, that, once blessed with hot water, will blossom to the full of their original, delicate, dancing beauty.  Fascinating!

We capture the beauty of this tea, of that moment of blossoming, with our Chrysanthemum Flower Jelly 菊花茶凍, where the delicate taste of this flower tea can be enjoyed against the full glory of the flower's beauty.

Candied Winter Melon Tea 冬瓜糖涼茶

As the season turns and the days grow warmer it's time for some "cooling teas" also known as 涼茶.  Chinese believe that the food that they eat balance and nourish the body to good health, especially with respect to the needs that seasonal changes bring to the body.  Cooling teas help to dispel the heat, or 熱氣, caused by warm weather.

This particular cooling tea caught my eye because the main ingredient is one of my favorite fruit candies, the candied winter melon 冬瓜糖.  We've actually made winter melon tea before from fresh winter melon and it was plenty delish.  So now we got to try it with candied winter melon. 

The results were most satisfying and a lot easier to make. The candied fruit provided an intense but totally light vanilla sweetness with grassy notes and a touch of smokiness to a most delightfully refreshing Candied Winter Melon Tea 冬瓜糖涼.  This fragrant herbal tea was a cinch to whip up!

Longan Jujube Tea 桂圓紅棗茶

Here's another one of the easy to make drinks we've been exploring making at home cuz we think it's great to make your own healthy drinks instead of buying them.  This Chinese "tea" will delight your throat and sooth your tummy; it's simple and quick to prepare yet very yummy.

The "tea" is not actually a tea but a simple simmer of Chinese dried fruits.  This Longan Jujube Tea 桂圓紅棗茶 is a delicious sweet drink, infused with the delicate florals of longan fruit and the rich undertones of Chinese jujubes and accented with the tart juiciness of wolfberries.   This tea is a warming tea and will help calm your mind and to have better sleep.  

I've been waffling about whether to do this post now or not as the weather here in HK has been having a topsy turvy month, first cold one day, then warm the next and then repeat.  Finally I've decided to do the warming one for now and a cooling one a bit later when the weather really does decide to change for good.  That way, dear readers, you can choose according to your needs!

Winter Melon Tea 冬瓜茶

This delightfully soothing and refreshing Winter Melon Tea 冬瓜茶 is something we recently discovered when eating out at a local Taiwanese restaurant.  It was so refreshing and good I couldn't believe that I'd never come across this delicious drink before!  

Apparently it's a widely enjoyed beverage in Taiwan and super healthy to boot, chock full of vitamin C (boosts immunity!), antioxidants, magnesium, phosphorus and calcium.  Super good for your health!  Winter melon is considered cooling to the body in Chinese medicine so this is the perfect refreshing drink as the weather starts to warm up.  

It was a serendipitous discovery as I've been obsessing recently over the issue of drinks and the fact that modern life seems to requires that a lot of drinks be purchased and lugged home.  I always wondered, what did folk do for drinks back in the days before supermarkets and convenience stores?  They made them at home, of course, and thus my search has been to discover traditional healthy teas and tonic drinks that can be easily made at home.   

What a cool thing it is to have a constant supply of delicious easy to make healthy tea/drink in fridge to sip whenever one is thirsty!

Osmanthus Flower Tea 桂花茶糖漿

This post is for my dearest 媽媽.  She loves osmanthus flowers and has always planted an osmanthus tree wherever we lived.  When I was a little girl, our osmanthus tree was just outside my bedroom window and the flower's drifting scent would steal in on the night breezes to soothe me to gentle sleep.  There is something otherworldly about the delicate, enchanting fragrance from these tiny flowers.  

That is why it is my great pleasure to share this very simple to make Osmanthus Flower Tea 桂花茶, which uses the dried flowers of the osmanthus to make a truly wonderfully fragrant and uplifting tea which is 100 percent guaranteed to make your day that much brighter and better!

Lemon and Job's Tears Herbal Tea 檸檬薏米茶

Wow...what can I say?  It’s been a really really rough month and really rough almost year here in Hong Kong, as I’m sure you all either have experienced yourself or have followed through the news.  First the protests and now the virus.  Sigh...it’s been crazy here in HK and now the craziness is spreading out unfortunately.

We were actually overseas on holiday when the recent viral craziness started.  As a result of the virus spreading the airlines started canceling flight after flight therefore resulting in us getting cancelled out of I don’t know how many flights and spending, literally, days on the phone trying to connect with airlines, to get on any gosh darn airplane, before, finally!, we snagged a plane home...only to face an eerie sea of masked Hong Kongers and sad empty supermarket shelves.

Kinda frightening at first but I think it's calmer now, there's a new normal, one might say, and folks are getting back to business of living and loving and, very importantly, the grocery shelves are filling back up as folks stop panic buying.

In this time of health awareness I've decided to do some tea therapy, making herbal health teas for my family to drink every day, strengthening our bodies as well as calming our spirits.  Our first tea is a Lemon and Job's Tears Herbal Tea, a refreshingly floral and tangy drink that works as a diuretic, boosts immunity, flushes out body dampness and helps to prevent common cold.  An overall amazing kind of tea!!

Pu-erh Tea Ice Cream 普洱茶雪糕

Something for the Chinese tea lover's pleasure...a soothing scoop or two of rich creamy homemade ice cream thoroughly scented and flavored with the earthy woodsy fragrance of Pu-erh tea 普洱茶.  We love Chinese Pu-erh tea in our house and drink it every single day.  

And since we also like to make our own ice cream (we've been doing for years even though we don't have an ice cream maker!) we decided to put these two favorite things together into one perfectly tea scented and creamily deliciously sweet Pu-erh Tea Ice Cream 普洱茶雪糕.  

Oh my gosh, I love this tea ice cream!  Why the heck didn't I do this before?  Turns out tea and ice cream is a made in heaven combination of fragrance and creaminess and just the perfect thing to go along with a leisurely afternoon tea break!

Green Bean Licorice Prickly Heat Herbal Tea 生地綠豆甘草茶

Do you ever think about how much beverage we buy and lug home to drink?  Water, juices, sodas, etc.  Heavy to lug home, liquid in bottles is heavy, amiright?  We buy beverages too, but it's been humming in the back of my mind for a while that there must be a better option.  

What, for example, did people used do for everyday for cool and refreshing drinks in the days before the invention of modern packaging?  They made their own drinks, of course!  

So recently when my little girl's eczema flared up again due to the already humid weather descending over Hong Kong, I decided to cook up a big ol' pot of Green Bean Licorice Prickly Heat Herbal Tea, or 生地綠豆甘草茶.  A cool, inexpensive, refreshing sweet Chinese beverage that makes a great everyday drink and soothes itchy skin and prickly heat.

Chinese Tea Eggs 茶葉蛋 - Egg Art

If you love eggs and you love art, surely you will love making and eating Chinese Tea Eggs 茶葉蛋.  What other food could provide such a deep visual artistic satisfaction while at the same providing an eggy snack that is really delicious, filling and unique in taste?

You can find tea eggs in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and anywhere there are Chinese people as the age old folksy 'go to' snack for the traveler or the person on the go.  In Hong Kong they even sell them mostly at the convenience stores now.  How ironic yet fitting in a way.  But really, buying a Tea Egg is missing the point.  It is so simple and fun to make your own.

Note: this is a repost because I seemed to have killed the original post in one of my 'coding' experiments.

Chinese Festival Cake - For Tea Time

 

Published: 2011-10-12 

It is always fun, if you have a sweet tooth, to discover new delicious pastries, cookies and cakes that you can bring home.  In this we are lucky as Hong Kong has more than its fair share of yummy pastry shops and bakery shops that sell all kinds of sweets from Chinese style to Western style.  

My relatives (usually female and always on a diet) always go berserk when they come here and see all the yummy pastries presented so nicely in the store windows.  And the sweets here are not over-sweetened like they are in the States.  Recently we picked up this Chinese Festival Cake at the wet market where they were selling all kinds of goodies for the Mid Autumn Festival.