Fauchon

second last tea of the evening…soo delicious, and the perfect chocolatey, orange cap to the day of sipdowns…even if my movie watching tonight was ruined by testing running over…like it always does… ugh

Last tea of the evening since I have to work tomorrow. Blech. Not looking forward to it but at least I can do it at home! Plus this weekend, my parents are around for a day or so. It’ll be nice to see them.

oh man… speaking of orange creamsicles….i so wish this tea tasted exactly like it smells…but it doesn’t ‘cause it’s chocolate and orange. But man, ditch the chocolate and THIS would be it.

Now…having said that. YES! i am a fan! I have no issues with rooibos so it’s game on for me.. orange and cocoa and soooo good! Glad i picked this one up during my winner’s fauchon splurge :)

more tea from variaTEA, figured i’d start with some of the teas in tins. It was nice to see this one again though i think it’s aged a little. The creamy lemon is a little less bright than i remembered, but still tasty. :)

my last cup of this…farewell winter tea! Maybe that means spring will be just around the corner.On the whole, i really enjoyed this tea more than i thought i would given my preferences when it comes to white teas. I’m not sure that i’d purchase it again, but i’d be willing to share a tin or swap for some more in future!

mmmm so strange how delicious this is. I’m glad i shared the tin with Cavo, because i’m not sure i could get through a whole tin, but the amount i do have i will enjoy. creamy delicious lemoney goodness :) When fauchon does something right (without flowers!) they do it right :)

I’m not really sure what possessed me to buy an entire tin of a white tea. But i did. I think i was carried away with that whole FAUCHON! at winners! stupidly cheap prices! GO! so now i have a huge tin of this. And i don’t really like white teas…

but this tea? I like it! so ha! I couldn’t drink this everyday but it’s certainly a tasty tea. Creamy vanilla delicious tea with a splash of “wake up! it’s lemon!” :) Yep…i will enjoy this, though it may take me the whole year to drink it.

This is a Fauchon tea (#50) that I bought kind of on a whim, because it was there, and I thought it might be fine although the flavors didn’t really call to me. It seems like a tea I wouldn’t like all that much (I don’t usually do mint, and never with fruit), but somehow the raspberry and mint actually work together here. I think it’s the sizeable helping of creamy vanilla that smooths it all out and brings it together. I definitely don’t regret buying it.

Behold, the only minty tea that I actually really like. It’s minty, but it’s not overly minty. I think it’s the creaminess that really smooths it over and makes it work for me. Granted, I don’t reach for it that often because I often have to be in the mood for a minty tea, but I do enjoy it. I should probably keep it in mind for after lunches out where I come back with onion breath, or if I need a stomach settler. I never think of mint for that, but it is an obvious choice!

This is another tea that I have thanks to MissB! Canada definitely got more of the Fauchon teas than I ever saw in the States.

So I’m not usually one for mint in teas, but I bought this one anyway because I thought perhaps a small amount of mint used judiciously could work in a blend. For me, it does. Does it remind me of birthday cake? Well, not any kind of birthday cake I know. It does, however, remind me of some creamy, minty confection that is really lovely. I like a soft mint, and this is a soft mint. I think it’s kind of like buttermints… those mint candies that are creamy and just kind of dissolve in your mouth immediately. And although I usually don’t go for fruit and mint, the raspberry and mint works here for me. I could, honestly, imagine a raspberry mint buttercream frosting that would taste like this. For once, that sounds really tasty to me. :)

This is a tea (#51) that I bought not expecting to like as much as I did. Rose and vanilla can go sideways for me, but Fauchon knows how to do it right. The raspberry probably helps. A very springy tea, and since we are starting to have very springy weather, fairly appropriate (although it is the dismal rainy kind of spring weather today). Although I am unfortunately not enjoying this in Paris.

I drank this one yesterday afternoon but didn’t log it as I got wrapped up in work. I had to skip my two Hawaiian Lupicia blends in my chronology because they live at home and I keep forgetting to bring some of the sachets in to have at work. Must try to remember!

By smell of the dry leaf alone, this tea seems like it will be overwhelming in the flavoring and floral department. It’s INTENSE. But once it’s brewed it mellows considerably. I had this one yesterday when it was still le printemps outside (today it is l’hiver again! snowing!), and it was so pleasant. Fruity, creamy, and a nice helping of rose; yes please! I thought I didn’t like rose and vanilla together (bad previous tea experiences) but this one (and a few other French teas) proves me wrong.

I’m going to start this review by saying that I’m really glad I picked this one up at TJ Maxx. This is my kind of tea!

So this is raspberry, vanilla and rose. And it’s actually the second tea in a row that I had this morning (the first being todays Dammann advent that will be logged tomorrow) that was SUPER creamy. Just lovely. The vanilla is so smooth and sweet. The raspberry is nice fruity, the rose is lush. I even like the green base on this one, which is admittedly not super prominent but it is somehow robust enough and plays well with the rest of the flavors. Yum!

huh, thanks MissB for revealing the maybe answer to the riddle!

i’ve always been a riddle boy, lol. nina’s for red fruit teas. dammann freres for fruits of all kinds. mariage freres for snapshots of impressionists’s dreams…… fauchon for flavoured greens?

a light sweet raspberry rose tea. unique. beautiful. maybe the answer is this: i like my fauchon green. don’t think i would have guessed that, lol.

thank you MissB. (always lookin’ out for me) xo

this is a beautiful piece. if i could drink it and frame it i would.

funny…. i know i’ve already reviewed this tea, but poof! it’s gone. maybe the steepster renovations ate it?

this is a lovely blend. it was a surprise gift from MissB. months ago that i save.

an almost bitter black with a smooth almond rise that doesn’t run you over. i love the whole rosebuds in the blend… i don’t get a lot of floral notes, but they buds are lovely to look at.

i enjoyed it tonight with turbinado and cream. i think my initial problems negotiating with this tea may actually have been the sweetener i was using? it’s much more settling with turbinado than agave. interesting.

i do love this tea.

thank you again for this present B. even though it was months ago now. =0) still makes me smile!

wrote my last exam. blanked for the second half of it. the prof is fascinated by my final project…. column A column B situation? sigh. either 3 weeks of break…. some sedate keener studying and this tea was day 1 of ’it’s done’.

this is a different spin on french tea! fauchon and i called a truce today and i wound up with the tea manifesting as i believe it should. entirely ENTIRELY different from dammann freres, mariage freres and nina’s paris……

a bittersweet marzipan cake. an element of green to it. more nuanced than the others, as opposed to robust. it has a disconcerting thin element to it. now i know that tea isn’t supposed to be thick, and yet somehow i have lots of french teas that somehow carry weight?

just a different evolution in my tea repertoire…. a new volume to add, and a very gracious one at that.

thank you MissB for this celebratory cup. i’m going to keep playing until i’m sort out my steeping parameters =0)

very graceful, very smooth, very new!

Ok, back to a bit of normalcy. This one (#55) isn’t the most scintillating of my Fauchon teas, but it is pretty tasty. I like apricot and citrus well enough but I am honestly a bit meh on this one today. Probably I should cold brew it. I could also just be having a bad tea day. :P

So I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t been drinking this one all out of order for my chronology lately. It’s been “coming up” in the list for a while now and there were a number of teas I thought I was going to have to skip because they were at home (but then I actually drank them this weekend). I never got around to writing a tasting note for this any time recently, though, so it’s still in order.

All of which is to say, I apparently like this tea quite a bit. The flavors don’t quite stick out at me, but It’s fruity, it’s rosey, it’s just a pleasant blend that I enjoy enough to reach for it fairly frequently. Funny how some blends get like that! I guess it’s a good thing that the blend I reach for frequently is one that I have a large amount of, although it would probably be good to reach for some of the other 100g tins occasionally as well!

Dreaming of an evening in France on this snowy morning in Ohio. Sigh.

This is very nice, although I think perhaps I didn’t have enough leaf because it’s a little weaker than I have come to expect from Fauchon. I could smell the rose and fruit in this but I hadn’t looked up what else was in it before drinking it. I definitely got a lot of orangey citrus from this, so that’s good. Nicely rosy, and the bae as a really yummy cookie-ish note. Really it’s just something that I often find in rose and/or bergamot teas that comes across as sugar cookie to me, and I think it’s really the way the flavoring is interacting with the base. Very pleased with this one as well.

I’m going to do a tasting note for this one (#56) now, even though I actually drank it a couple of weekends ago, because it’s a home/weekend tea, and it’s Monday, so if I don’t retroactively write this note it will get lost in the rest.

The reason that this is a home/weekend tea is that it has an Assam base, and is way to strong/astringent for me without additions. It does, however, make the best Hong Kong-style rose milk teas. I used a recipe from Lupicia that I always keep on my fridge. De-licious.

It’s over 80°F here today, so it’s been a mostly iced-tea afternoon. This is one of the teas on my chronology, although I’ve had it fairly frequently and out of order throughout this project because often on the weekend I am limited in my selection. That and apparently I’ve been feeling rosey lately.

But now is it’s time, so I am having it again. Today I used Lupicia’s Royal Milk Tea Recipe. It came on one of their newsletters this winter and I clipped it out and put it on my fridge because it really makes the best milk tea. (I reproduced it in this note for Assam Calcutta Auction: http://steepster.com/dinosara/posts/219625). This time I didn’t heat the milk, added 2 tsp of sugar, and I shook the whole thing with an ice cube to make iced rose milk tea, and let me tell you, it was delicious! Just like getting an iced rose milk tea in Beijing. I forsee doing this often this summer.

Side note, I went onto Lupicia’s site to see if they had the milk tea recipe on there and it’s there but not easy to link to and makes a ton of tea at a time instead of just a cup. ANYWAY, the “featured” recipe on their main page (http://www.lupiciausa.com/v/static/enjoy-tea/tea-recipes.html) is for Marshmallow Peach Tea… tea with marshmallows added? You be crazy, Lupicia, although that does sound kind of awesome anyway.

I have become very glad that I bought a tin of this despite my general dislike of assams, because it makes the most awesome rosey milk tea. I love having it in the morning when I’m taking an easy morning, like this morning was. It would probably make a great base for a rose milk bubble tea too (one of my faves).

Also, if you have a Ravelry account, and you wouldn’t mind helping me win a contest, can you mosey over to this link and click the “agree” button (at the bottom of the post) on my owls (midway down the page): http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/malabrigo-junkies/2858677/51-75

Voting ends at the end of the day today!

Today I wanted a lush French blend and was kicking myself for taking nearly all my Dammann into work. But I did have a little bit of this so I made myself a rose milk tea, since the Assam base is too robust for my taste buds. It was very rosy and very lovely.