Teatime Tuesday #14

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I considered doing a different post for today, just to shake things up a little, but then I thought, why mess with tradition? (Even traditions that have only existed a few months, and have little to no importance!) So with that said, on to teatime.

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You may have noticed, dear reader, that I’ve been obsessed with scones lately. Well, today I’m eating scones again. But these are different scones! They are, in fact, glazed. Yes, the difference is dramatic indeed. (Or, well, not.) They’re cranberry orange scones, though, so there’s that!

I did decide they were different enough to avoid my usual addition of jam. It seemed like that combo would be too sweet, even for me. And I have to say, they were pretty darn tasty on their own.

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As for my tea, I decided to pick something that would match the tart flavor of the scones. So I steeped up a cup of Ginger and Orange black tea from Lupicia. I haven’t had a gingery tea like this one in a while, so it tastes a bit like coming home. I used to drink ginger-flavored teas almost constantly in the winter. This particular blend turned out to be a great complement to my sugary scones.

Thanks for joining me for tea, once again! I hope to follow up with more about my trip to England later in the week.

England Retrospective Part Two

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For part one of my trip to England, go here.

We left London on a drizzling silver morning, and drove west toward the Cotswolds. I had seen a small part of the English countryside before, on a sightseeing tour to Oxford and Stratford-Upon-Avon. But that tour had only lasted a day. Now I was about to spend the better part of two weeks visiting various landmarks in and around rural southern England.

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We first stopped at a pretty market town named Stow-On-The-Wold. It was around midmorning, and still a while before lunch, so I purchased a Chelsea bun from one of the bakeries. It was sticky and warm, and heavily spiced with cinnamon. As I left the bakery, it began to rain again. It was little more than a feathery drizzle, so I kept walking with my mother and grandmother through the town streets, and we peeked into a multitude of shops. The wares were varied—garden ornaments, used books, glittering scarves, even art supplies.

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I lingered in front of a candy shop to finish my Chelsea bun, and thought about how this town was a part of England (and the English experience as a whole) that I had never seen before. (Not in person, at least, though it certainly brought to mind scenes from movies and books I’ve loved for years!)

Then my mother stopped in at one shop to buy a jacket for my father, and I wandered off toward the church, a smallish structure I’d seen earlier during our walk. It lay beyond a tall gate, and was bordered by long stretches of grass. Tombstones jutted out at intervals, many of them worn almost blank. The door of the church stood open, despite the soft chill in the air. I shivered, not from cold or the presence of graves but a feeling of familiarity, of resonance.

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I had written about a small church in the English countryside before—a place one of the characters in my novels called home. It’s strangely rewarding, to seek out the sort of places that you once could only imagine inside your head, and experience them as real, solid beneath your feet.

It was far from the last time I would have that experience on my tour.

Teatime Tuesday #13

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Welcome back to teatime! Today I was lucky enough to be able to sample my sister’s homemade buttermilk scones, which are fluffy and sweet and oh-so-delicious. (As you may have noticed, dear reader, I like scones. A lot.)

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I paired the scones with some berry preserves and one of my all-time favorite teas, the Premium Taiwanese Assam from Butiki. Butiki Teas is a small company with lots of great teas, including straight blends and some really original flavors. (As you can imagine, it’s really popular on Steepster.) Sadly, it’s in the process of closing, so I stocked up on all my favorites a few months ago.

Their Premium Taiwenese Assam is a straight tea with huge dark leaves. When steeped, it smells like berries—so much so that my friends all assumed it was a flavored tea when they smelled it! It’s also a black tea, but so sweet and smooth that it has no astringency at all. There’s even a note of cocoa in it, which just adds to the deliciousness.

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Thanks for joining me for tea!

Teatime Tuesday #12

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Welcome back to Teatime Tuesday! This post is another short one, because my tea was on the simple side today.

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For my choice of tea, I sipped a cup of Laoshan Village Chai from Verdant. This is probably my favorite chai right now (and I’ve guzzled quite a few chai blends over the years). This particular blend is heavy on the ginger, my all-time favorite spice, and it has some sweet ingredients as well—like goji berries, elderberry, and vanilla bean. Yeah, it’s just as delicious as it sounds.

This time around, I paired the tea with an English muffin (cinnamon raisin!) from Wolferman’s, once again courtesy of my grandmother in Chicago. Needless to say, the combined smell of spices in the muffin and the tea was pretty intoxicating. (And as a bonus, my empty mug smelled exactly like the gingerbread cookie dough my grandmother from Arizona makes each Christmas.)

As always, thanks for joining me for tea!

England Retrospective: Part One

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My family visited England and France during my sophomore year of high school. It was my first trip outside the United States. We stayed in London and Paris. Both cities were beautiful, but I wound up preferring London, mostly because I knew more about English history. I explored the Tower of London, saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe, and even managed to go to Wimbledon. (My dad and I are longtime tennis fans.)

That was over a decade ago. In the meantime, I completed a degree in English Literature and wrote two novels set in a fantasy version of London. So when my grandmother approached me about going on a tour of the English countryside, I was quick to accept. There was still so much of England I hadn’t seen in person. (There still is, sadly!)

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Kensington Gardens

We began our tour in London, in July of 2014. We stayed in a hotel near Kensington Gardens, next to Hyde Park, and I had my first indelible moment there—one of those instants where time freezes because your mind is racing to commit it to memory. As I wandered beneath the towering trees, surrounded by every possible shade of green, I was flooded with a familiar sense of awe. I was in London again, a place with so much history (and so much foliage, compared to my desert home). I was following in the steps of Londoners from centuries ago, to say nothing of monarchs like Queen Victoria.

That’s when I came upon Kensington Palace, which houses an exhibit about Victoria. Somehow I had forgotten the palace was her childhood home (much to my writerly shame!). A statue of her even graces the walk toward the exhibit. It was carved from a model made by her daughter, Princess Louise.

Princess Louise's statue of her mother, Victoria. Also, a cute family of ducks!

Princess Louise’s statue of her mother. Also, a family of ducks!

In case it isn’t obvious, Victoria is my favorite monarch, from my favorite period in history. She’s complicated and fascinating (and so much more than the stereotypical image of a stuffy old widow in a black dress). The exhibit at Kensington Palace pays tribute to every stage of her life. I saw sketches she drew as a little girl, and wandered through the rooms where she grew up. I saw her wedding dress, along with many gifts from her beloved husband Prince Albert—including my favorite piece, a bracelet with heart-shaped charms representing each of their nine children.

Queen Victoria's Wedding Dress

Victoria’s Wedding Dress

Victoria's Charm Bracelet

Victoria’s Charm Bracelet

Queen Victoria is special. She’s part of the history I love most: the oh-so-contradictory Victorians, a mixed-up crowd of moralists and reformers and inventors and imperialists. They’re gray in the extreme, yet so many of them viewed their lives in black and white—including Victoria herself. It was a thrill for me to experience even a sliver of that part of history in person, and a wonderful surprise for my first day in England.

Next came our journey into the English countryside… But that’s for another post!