Although I love the practice and luxury of high tea, pairing tea with confection products can require as much skill as pairing wine with dinner or dessert. Complementary tea flavors elevate the entire experience of small bites of savories and sweets. Tea also settles the body and mind, luring us into a calm and relaxed respite that enhances enjoyment of our dessert pairing.
Essential Confection product development always has wine and tea pairings in mind. Moscato d’asti, a sweet, bubbly Italian dessert wine, has flavors of peaches, grapes, orange blossoms and Meyer lemons. It pairs beautifully with Mini Essential Butter Cake and grilled fruit. Moscato d’asti is traditionally paired with Essential Panettone, our classic, artisan dessert-bread, as well. Creative companies like Traveling Vineyard offer specific wine pairing suggestions for many, many foods – salty, savory and sweet. Here’s a neat tool to explore on their site.
A green oolong, chai tea or milky English breakfast tea would be lovely with our butter cake. A fruity green tea is a great accompaniment to the citrus and yeasty flavors of panettone. The same vocabulary we use to describe wine or aperitifs – tannins, terroir, fruit undertones – applies to tasting tea.
Right hand the rudder
steadying cup’s stern, translucent hands gift
viscous tastes of silky vanilla…
Because of my interest in single-flavor and textural development in confection products, tea pairings are a logical next step to more fully enjoying our products. We will be partnering with tea aficionados to offer the most gratifying tea-dessert pairings.
We wish to deepen your enjoyment of Essential Confection products, and to heighten your awareness of how flavors contribute to and juxtapose one another for added pleasure.
Mini Essential Butter Cake is available year-round in any quantity for events and gift-giving. Contact us to chat about a larger order to reconnect with those whose relationships you value.
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On the Topic of Eccentricities
By lindanaylor
On March 24, 2021
In Confection Commentary
Yesterday, the word “eccentricities” found its way into a conversation among a group of very dear and insightful women. We marveled at how mature relationships have a profoundly different resonance than those early experiments of our youth.
One person’s perceived eccentricities are another person’s charm or brilliance – her je ne sais quoi – elusive qualities that are not easily named.
Pleasing, somewhat undefinable qualities not only endear us to others; they enhance our lives when we sample things of unexpected quality. Several years ago, I tasted a product new to the Portland food market. The company, Cocacao, blends cacao, coconut nectar and coconut oil into a silky treat that is further enhanced with nuts, spices and fruit. It was a revelation that lingers in my memory.
Essential Confection empowers our customers to gift that special ‘eccentricity’ – that unexpected quality – to their recipients.
Of cacao’s munificence,
a brush stroke of coconut
paints ecstasy into being.
Oh, sweet virtue!
Whose eccentric qualities enliven your life?
www.EssentialConfection.com
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