Bird & Blend – Lemugar Pancake, Strawberry Nutella Pancake and Maple Bacon Pancake
It’s Shrove Tuesday! A day in the liturgical calendar dedicated apparently to self-examination, confession and spiritual growth. It’s also (being day the before Ash Wednesday) when one finishes up any indulgent foodstuffs in the house before embarking on forty days of Lenten self-deprivation. But for godless heathens like me who plan to make no sacrifices whatsoever for Lent, it’s really just about the pancakes.
This year as well as eating a satisfying amount of pancakes, I am reviewing three (three!) different types of pancake tea from Bird & Blend. These are: Lemon and Sugar pancake tea, Strawberry & Nutella pancake tea and (slightly worryingly) Maple Bacon pancake tea.
Lemugar Pancake
I referred to this tea as ‘Lemon and Sugar’ earlier on, partly because that’s what it is but mostly because I’m really not happy with the word ‘Lemugar’. It doesn’t roll off the tongue. Well it does, but it comes out as “Le-Mooga” which doesn’t actually rhyme with sugar and sounds like some kind of marmoset, smallish big cat or elk.
I bought this tea last year and, sadly, Bird & Blend don’t seem to be stocking it this year. This is a great shame because lemon and sugar are, really, the only acceptable pancake toppings on Shrove Tuesday. We’ll have none of this weird-arse Nutella and maple syrup malarkey in the Tea Fancier household.
The tea itself is lovely. It’s a Rooibos-based blend with fancy hipster versions of its two main flavours. Because I don’t just want any common-or-garden sugar and lemon. I want coconut nectar sugar and fermented lemon peel. And that is precisely what I got.
Strawberry & Nutella Pancake
This is a strawberry and chocolate-based tea with caramelised hazelnut which makes for a dark, rich, creamy blend. It’s the tea equivalent of eating Nutella straight from the jar and then probably bathing in it.
Strawberry & Nutella Pancake tea contains both cocoa nibs and cocoa shells so it’s presumably doubly chocolatey. The inclusion of the roasted hazelnuts means that it’s reminiscent of Bird & Blend’s Hazelnut Rocher which I also love. Except with extra added strawberry! (As with all the teas in the review, the ‘pancake’ part of the tea’s flavour is left to the tea-sipper’s imagination.)
It feels wonderfully self-indulgent although I’m sure it’s actually very good for you. Those freeze-dried strawberries count as one of your five a day, right?
Maple Bacon Pancakes
Oh dear. Vegan bacon-flavoured tea was always going to be a risk. And to be honest, the disappointment here is all on me. If I had given even a cursory glance at the ingredients list before buying this tea, I would have known it was not for me.
Bird and Blend have attempted to replicate the taste of smoky bacon by using famously smoky black tea, Lapsang Souchong in their blend. It was an obvious choice, really, when you think about it. I’m not sure how else I thought they were going to do it. I think I envisaged the drink tasting of (and possibly being made of) Frazzles. Now I actually think about it, that would be a terrible idea.
As regular readers know, Lapsang Souchong and I do not get on. I don’t like the fact that it tastes of ash trays and, I imagine, Lapsang Souchong is probably sick of me going on about it.
No regrets, though. I wanted to feast on pancake-themed teas and I think we can all agree that I did just that. And I had actual pancakes. It’s been a good day.
