Celestial Seasonings – Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride
Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride from Celestial Seasonings is an interesting tea. It’s not in any way pleasant; let’s get that established at the outset. It’s not even a tea being a non-tea blend of milk thistle, roasted barley, orange peel and flavourings. But it doesn’t fit into the usual herbal tea categories of “hot squash” or “delicately scented water”, so it is worthy of some consideration.
For a start, it tastes almost entirely of sugar. Obviously, there was a clue there in the name. But, here’s the thing, it doesn’t list sugar or any sugar substitutes in its ingredients. Sure, it’s got “natural sugar cookie flavour”, but can one legally sneak stevia or aspartame or whatnot into a product that way?
Somewhere beneath the sugar-coated Candy Mountain of sweetness, there are some other flavours lurking about. Roasted barley sounded promising. I generally quite like it when people put cereal products into tea bags. Toasted rice is always a delight, and buckwheat was surprisingly acceptable as a non-tea tea alternative. I think it gives Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride a bit of substance that you don’t get from other herbal blends.
I’m not sure it’s the barley that provides the slight celery soup aftertaste, though. That’s probably down to the milk thistle. Thistle doesn’t sound like a promising ingredient in a hot beverage. And Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride has done nothing to persuade me otherwise.
So what is a sugar cookie, and how does it distinguish itself from every other type of biscuit containing sugar? Well, given that they’re made of flour, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla and baking powder, sugar cookies would appear just to be your common-or-garden plain biscuit. They’re frequently cut into shapes before baking in the manner of gingerbread men, which explains the sugar cookie trees, reindeer and hat-wearing sleigh-riding couple on the rather natty retro-looking teabag box.
Sugar cookies are also called gemmells, crybabies, gimbletts, cimbellines, jumbles, and plunketts. All of which are much better names. They’re also known as Nazareth cookies, which got the name from Nazareth, Pennsylvania and not the other more famous Nazareth that often gets mentioned at this time of year.
The teamonger Celestial Seasonings (est 1969) is, according to the box blurb, America’s first herbal tea company, so kudos to them for that. But this blend of thistle and cookie-flavouring is, to my mind, really not the delicious sweet treat in a mug that its manufacturers were probably aiming for.
Today’s book pairing is The Night before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore because my copy matches the (admittedly very pretty) box quite well.
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