Blooming Tea at Hong Kong Airport

Red Blooming Tea at Hong Kong Airport

Flew over the home of tea recently – China – and managed to see the night sky, the night lights of all the vessels on the Hong Kong harbour and the airport.  That was it.  We were on our way to London from Sydney via Hong Kong.   Although I would have loved to visit some tea gardens and find out first hand how blooming tea balls are made, this trip was not the time to do that.

The stopover at Hong Kong was uneventful except for the lightening storm nearby which we obviously managed to get through safely! Read the rest of this entry »

Cup-of-tea Cake Recipe

Whilst in London on a recent visit I came across a recipe in “The Times” which I thought sounded delicious. My attention was caught by the handwriting in the newspaper, which of course is most unusual.  The handwriting was clearly older style and when I saw “two cups of cold tea” I thought perhaps this was a great way to use tea left over from watching blooming tea! But really, tea from flowering or blooming tea is generally not strong enough to give much flavour, let alone the strength of flavour required for a cake. Read the rest of this entry »

Brewing Blooming Tea

How many articles are there on how to brew Flowering Tea?  Too many, I say!  It’s not difficult, is it, to put a Blooming Tea Ball in a glass container, throw hot water over it and watch it blossom?  Yet, there are countless articles on how to do this very thing.

What’s not explained is how easy it is to mess up blooming tea.  Because it’s made up of white tea, black tea, loose green tea, flowers tea and petals from pretty (occasionally not so pretty) flowers, this tea is easily over-steeped and therefore bitter, or under-steeped and therefore tasteless. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Blooming Tea a Healthy Drink or Just a Gimmick?

There are many websites, blogs, articles and various pieces of information about how beneficial tea is to our health.  And most of these sources talk about white tea, loose green tea, jasmine green tea and all sorts of other teas, some exotic, some very ordinary, some organic.  But very, very few talk about blooming tea, or flowering tea as it is sometimes called, and the health benefits in drinking this type of tea. Read the rest of this entry »