Black Tea Cake with Honey Cream Cheese Icing

In the last few months I've spotted a few cake recipes that use tea to flavour the cake. I have been dying to try it out and was not disappointed with the results.

I'm a big tea drinker (and a bit of a tea-snob actually). I have a large collection of different leaves so I can always select the tea that I feel in the mood for. I also shared my cake with The Dashing Hans who is another tea connoisseur and who has shared many tea-related journeys with me. We both agreed that the flavour wasn't as tea-ish as we would have liked, so next time I bake this cake I will replace the regular Assam leaves with something a bit stronger (like a Russian Caravan or a Lapsang). But other than that this cake was delicious!

This recipe comes from Pastry Affair and I found it worked perfectly.

Ingredients

1 cup milk 
3 tablespoons black tea (or the contents of 3 tea bags)* 
55 grams butter
1 cup granulated sugar** 
2 large eggs 
1/4 cup vegetable oil 
1 teaspoon vanilla extract 
1 3/4 cups plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 
1/2 teaspoon baking soda 
1/2 teaspoon salt

*As I mentioned above, I used a regular Assam blend (Daintree Tea to be exact). This tea is quite full bodied so I was expecting the flavour to come through stronger. I'll be sure to update when I've tested on different blends of tea.

**I felt this gave the cake a much more caramel flavour that may have been why the tea flavour was lost. Next time I bake this I will be using a finer blend of sugar.

Bonus Baking Tip - Get your eggs, milk and butter out early as you should always bake with these at room temperature. Having the butter at room temperature makes it easier to beat and if you bake with cold eggs and milk it can cause your mixture to shrink when baking giving you a tough cake.

Method

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius and prepare you baking pan (about 20cm will be fine).

Warm you milk up close to boiling point (you can do this on the stove or the microwave). Then add your tea leaves directly into the milk. If you are using tea-bags, don't just dunk them in but cut them open as you want all the leaves in there. Set aside to cool.

Cream together your butter and sugar until it's light and fluffy then add the eggs one at a time. Beat well after each egg. Now add the vegetable oil and vanilla extract.

In a separate bowl sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Add 1/3 of your flour mix to your wet mix and mix until just combined. Resist the urge to use electric beaters to mix your flour this over-beats the mixture and results in tough cakes. Add 1/3 of your milk/tea mix and stir to combine. Continue until you've added all your flour and milk/tea. You should have a smooth batter - I had to add a little more flour to get a nice cake batter consistency.

Pour your mix into your pre-prepared cake pan and bake for 30-40 minutes. Remove and allow to cool on a wire rack before icing.

Honey Cream Cheese Icing

250 grams cream cheese
1 cup of icing sugar (give or take for taste and consistency)
1/2 cup of honey (give or take for taste and consistency)

Beat together cream cheese, icing sugar and honey until you have a flavour and consistency that you like.

Note: the more you beat the more this icing will become runny. To obtain a stiff icing you can pipe with, use really cold cream cheese, add more icing sugar and beat as little as possible.

Drizzle over cake

I added some lemon zest as well :)

Enjoy with a good cup of tea.