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T2 are an enterprising bunch of teamongers from Australia. So what better way to acquaint myself with their Australian-ness than with Lamington Tea? Lamingtons were included in the top 15 innovations and inventions representing Queensland in the state’s 150th birthday celebrations, along with the Flying Doctors and the cervical cancer vaccination.
I confess I have never tried never actually tasted a real live lamington in real live life. They are, as I understand it, a cube of sponge cake encased in chocolate icing and generously coated with desiccated coconut. It appears to be a matter of some debate whether it is acceptable to include a layer of jam sandwiched between halves of the sponge cake in one’s lamington. (I imagine that this argument rages on much like the acceptability of jelly in trifle does over on this side of the world. For the avoidance of doubt, jelly has no place in trifle.)
T2 are clearly on the pro-jam side of the fence, given that their tea includes raspberry pieces and flavouring alongside the black tea, cocoa and coconut. It contains whopping great pieces of dried coconut, which look absolutely lovely, although I suspect that the natural and artificial flavourings are doing a lot of the work here.
There is an artificiality to this tea. The smell transported me back to my sticker-collecting childhood and some coconut scratch-and-sniff stickers I used to have, but weirdly, that doesn’t detract from the pleasure of drinking the stuff. It tastes like the sort of cake you’d buy individually wrapped at the supermarket, rather than something you would make at home. It does definitely taste of cake which I always consider a good thing in a beverage.
This tea is really delicious in fact; just the right combination of chocolatiness, raspberryness, coconuttiness and black tea, without any of the flavours taking more than their fair share of the attention.
I bought this tea as part of T2’s Baxter’s Bakery collection, so there will be further Australian-bakery-inspired reviews coming over the next couple of days. I’m excited to find out what else these intrepid Antipodeans have come up with.
Note: The version of T2’s Lamington tea that I tried (the one that came in the Baxter’s Bakery gift box) definitely included raspberry. However, the Lamington Tea that T2 sells separately on its website is entirely fruitless and just contains tea, chocolate and coconut. Clearly the ‘To jam or not to jam’ debate still rages on.
Today’s featured book is Retro Favourites published by the Australian Women’s Weekly. No jam in their lamingtons, mate.
