This site uses Amazon Affiliate Links. If you click on an Amazon link from this page and make a purchase, I will – at no cost to you – earn a small commission.
I’ve been on quite the adventurous tea journey this week. I expanded my tea horizons by trying both a Matcha and a Pu-Erh-type tea for the very first time. I feel like quite exhausted explorer after that. I determined, therefore, that my next tea review would be something frivolous and comforting. And this thought took me directly to my SaChasi tea stash and Spiced Jaffa Cake tea.
Obviously, I didn’t know that SaChasi Spiced Jaffa Cake would be comforting before I tried it, but I suspected that it might be, and being a wondrous combination of Sri Lankan black tea, orange peel, cocoa and spices, it absolutely was. I have decided that SaChasi’s primary business model is sending out great big warm hugs through the medium of tea blends.
Here’s an interesting fact I discovered in the writing of this review, The Jaffa orange – after which the McVities Jaffa Cake and this tea are named – is now obsolete as a fruit variety. If you want to pop into Sainsbury’s and purchase a Jaffa orange, you are bang out of luck. Its legacy lives on only in Jaffa Cakes and Jaffa Cake-inspired products like this one.
This tea is absolutely delicious. It’s a chocolatey, orangey, spicy cakebiscuit of a brew. I was going to say that it’s my favourite SaChasi tea so far but I think, honestly, that my favourite SaChasi tea is whichever one I am drinking at the moment.
I do have one very serious complaint about it though. There is no real-world equivalent of the Spiced Jaffa Cake. McVities have mucked about with the ‘smashing orangey bit’ from time to time, introducing limited edition cranberry, blackcurrant and passionfruit alternatives, but they have never – as far as I can see – strayed from the straight and narrow with regards to the Genoise sponge that makes up the bulk of a Jaffa Cake.
And until I had this tea, I was quite content with that. Now, however, I see there is a great yawning chasm in the world where a Spiced Jaffa Cake should be. Chocolate, orange and a cinnamon and nutmeg-flavoured sponge base. It would be amazing.
So McVities, I’d like you to get on that straightaway, please. Once I have an IRL 3D Spiced Jaffa Cake to go with my SaChasi Spiced Jaffa Cake tea, the world will truly be a magical and perfect place.
Today’s featured book is Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier. Chosen because this tea’s main ingredients – cocoa, orange and spices – are all primary agricultural exports of Jamaica. Of course, Jamaica Inn is set in Cornwall, not Jamaica, but let’s not get too pedantic about this, shall we?
