Yesterday’s posts focused on tea. Now coffee gets its turn—in the form of coffee candy.
The artisans at How Do You Take Your Coffee?, a confectioner in Reno, Nevada, like their coffee so much that they freshly roast their own beans prior to making four different types of coffee candy.
The candies are innovative and sure to please the coffee lover—and the chocolate lover, too, since there’s a touch of chocolate in each.
The line is very different from Caffe Acapella coffee bars, a prior Top Pick Of The Week. Caffe Acapella make a chocolate bar-like product that’s all coffee.
How Do You Take Your Coffee? has bite-size candies—like the Java Rocks in the photo plus coffee and chocolate in a candy shell (think coffee M&Ms). The company uses fairly-traded coffee beans to make its products.
Check out the four different types of coffee candy line in the full review.
Zhena’s Gypsy Tea is perfectly packaged in a
metal container with an airtight lid. Photo by
Hannah Kaminsky | THE NIBBLE.
June is National Tea Month—drink those antioxidants up!
Tea is a fragile product: oxygen, humidity (moisture), heat, light and other aromas are its enemies. They cause the tea to go stale (lose its flavor) and equally bad, to take on other, unwanted flavors.
Under ideal conditions, black and oolong tea can remain fresh between 2-3 years and green and white tea can remain fresh for up to 2 years.
However, when you purchase tea, you have no idea how long ago it was picked and processed. The tea could have been sitting in a warehouse for a year or two before it was made into bags or sold as loose tea to a distributor. And that means even more time until it gets to the retail shelf. Thus:
Don’t buy more tea than you’ll use in 6 months (green tea) to a year (black tea). After the container is opened, oxygen interacts with it and the flavor begins to slowly dissipate. Jumbo boxes of 100 tea bags are no bargain unless you’ll use two bags per day.
Store tea in airtight containers, preferably metal, away from a heat source. Just because a container has a lid doesn’t mean it’s airtight—but it’s a start.
Everyone in the South knows about sweet tea, but it’s lesser known in other regions. Sometimes non-Southerners will come across “Southern-style tea” or “extra-sweet tea”—which is the same thing.
If you favor adding three or more sugars to your tea, this is the iced tea for you.
The extra sweetness comes from adding a generous amount of sugar to the water before it boils (or while it’s boiling). Adding the sugar to hot water, as opposed to chilled tea, enables the liquid to hold more sugar. In chemistry terms, that’s known as supersaturation.
After brewing, the tea is chilled. Sweet tea is such a popular beverage that West Bend sells an iced-tea maker with a “sweetener chamber” at the top, to conveniently dissolve sugar or other sweetener into the tea as it brews. (We brew iced tea daily without sugar and are in love with the Breville Tea Maker.)
MaryAnna’s all-natural bottled sweet tea is a nice introduction to quality sweet tea: It tastes like fresh-brewed. The Summer Sweet Tea has just the right amount of lemon juice to brighten the flavor without making it “lemony.” The Berry Sweet Tea is flavored with raspberry; the effect is one of fresh, infused berries. The teas are made with filtered water, premium tea and cane sugar.
Both flavors hit the spot. The only caveat is the sugar/carb count: one 16-ounce bottle has 160 calories, 38g of sugar and carbohydrates. A sixteen-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, by comparison, has 192 calories. But the sweet-of-tooth don’t read nutrition labels, and these sweet teas are brewed to please.
The winner takes the cake, cheesecake or
any four Sara Lee desserts. Photo courtesy Sara Lee.
This week’s prizes are all about that sweet treat you try to save room for at the end of a meal: dessert! (And who are we kidding: We always have room for dessert, but we don’t always wait until the end of a meal to enjoy it!)
One winner will get four coupons—each good for one free Sara Lee Frozen Dessert—along with two bonus Pepperidge Farm Deli Flats discount coupons (to possibly use for the meal before dessert).
Five other winners will have an opportunity to dress up their desserts with Smucker’s Dessert Toppings. Last year, consumers voted to determine the next Smucker’s Ice Cream Toppings flavor, and the winning flavor was Black Cherry Topping. Each winner will receive a jar of the winning topping, which is made with real black cherries, along with Smucker’s classic Special Recipe Milk Chocolate Topping.
THE PRIZE: One winner will receive coupons good for four free Sara Lee frozen desserts. Five additional winners will each get two Smucker’s dessert toppings to serve on ice cream sundaes, fresh fruit, cakes or pies. Total retail value of all prizes: $59.
To Enter This Gourmet Giveaway: Go to the box at the bottom of our Dessert Sauces & Toppings Section and enter your email address for the prize drawing. This contest closes on Monday, June 28th at noon, Eastern Time. Good luck!
To see all the Sara Lee frozen desserts, visit SaraLee.com.
To learn more about Smucker’s Dessert Toppings, visit Smuckers.com.
Steaz green tea soda (enhanced with food
color) and lemon sorbet. What should we
name it? Photo by Aron Kremer SXC.
Why is it called a “float?” The carbon dioxide in the soda causes the scoop of ice cream to float at the top of the glass.
In the early days of ice cream fountains (usually located in drug stores, where pharmacists mixed the syrups), plain soda water was mixed with a syrup to create the flavored soda. Things are so much easier today!
