Enough cake already?!

To satisfy the request for more cake, my healthy blog is turning into a cake blog, so this has to be the last, for a while at least!  
This recipe idea came purely from having some great products delivered to my kitchen - firstly a box arrived from Naturya, with their great superfood ingredients, and then more personally, my lovely friend Gail (founder of Kandula Tea) arrived fresh off the plane from Sri Lanka, with her latest blend of delicious teas.
Obviously the first thing we did was to have a cup of tea and catch up with all the gossip, but then I felt the need to use the tea for something more.......so cake it was!  
If you are a lover of mint tea I have tasted none better than Kandula - it tastes really fresh and tangy - as if there were fresh mint leaves dropped into the cup, with no tannin aftertaste that you find with a lot of other teas.
In December I will be visiting Sri Lanka, so will hopefully find out more about not only the tea, but also the wonderful food - lots of great vegetarian dishes and delicious fresh fish - watch this space!

Kandula Maca Tea Bread

Makes 1 loaf

200 g mixed dried fruit
250 ml Kandula Moroccan Mint tea (made with one bag)
125 g wholemeal self-raising flour
100 g self-raising flour
1 tbsp Naturya Maca powder
100 g golden caster sugar
25 g pecans, roughly chopped
50 g Coconoil, melted
1 egg

Preheat the oven to 180°C (375°F) Gas mark 5.  Grease and base line a 2 lb loaf tin.
Place the dried fruit into a bowl and pour over the hot tea.  Leave to stand for at least 4 hours.
Place the flours, maca powder, sugar and pecans into a large bowl.
Beat together the Coconoil and egg.
Add the dried fruit, tea and egg and Coconoil mixture to the dry ingredients and gently mix together - do not overmix.
Spoon into the prepared tin and bake for 45-50 minutes, until a sharp knife inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
Remove from the tin and leave to cool on a rack (if you can wait that long - I couldn't!)

Happy cake-eating!

J xx

Tea at Harrods

What a lovely start to the day - breakfast at Harrods!  But no ordinary breakfast, this was an invitation to sample what is on offer at the new Tea Room on the second floor, so cakes were available in abundance.  I had thought it far too early to be sampling these, but it didn't take long for me to crack.
Harrods' new novel idea is to have a kind if pick-and-mix with the cakes (this is after you have sampled their savories obviously) - you can decide what arrives on your three tiered cake-stand.  This is accompanied by the tea of your choice, from a 20 tea list, some of which we tasted this morning, made and poured by Yousef Serroukh, their tea and coffee buyer, who then gave us instruction on how to make the perfect cup of tea -

• always use well stored, top-quality loose tea
• a small china teapot will allow you to control the infusion of the tea much better than bigger pots -no large than 300ml
• be generous with the tea - around 5g for a 300ml teapot
• use filtered or bottled water for a better taste
• water temperature is crucial - white and yellow teas are best when infused at 40-60C, and black teas are better with near boiling water
• time your infusion - 3 minutes is the recommended optimum time

Yousef told us we should treat tea as a ritual, and in my mind this ritual should be accompanied by a big log fire, delicious cakes and close friends.