honey milk tea pine nut pound cakes.

Perhaps it's due to publishing relatively more posts in the past week that I have nothing much to write about as a preamble to the recipe. So I'll just cut straight to the point.

In a nutshell, these cakes taste intensely of milk tea, are dense and extremely extremely moist. If I ever need a slightly more unusual recipe to impress, this would be it.

School's starting soon and I can only hope I can post 5 times a month like 2013's average. Ah well.

P.S. I think hazelnuts would be good too in place of the pine nuts. Adding some orange peel wouldn't be a bad idea either!

Honey Milk Tea Pine Nut Pound Cakes
makes two mini loaves
slightly adapted from here

2 tsp black tea leaves
1/2 cup milk
3/4 stick butter
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
40ml honey
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
handful of pine nuts for topping the unbaked batter

Preheat oven to 350F. Prepare two mini loaf pans.

Place the milk and tea leaves in a saucepan and bring to a simmer. Remove from heat and let tea leaves steep for 1 hour. Strain the milk and set aside. If it doesn't add up to a 1/2 cup then simply top up with more milk.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add in the egg and beat until incorporated. Beat in the honey and vanilla extract.

Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together. Stir in the flour mixture (three additions) alternately with the milk (two additions).

Divide the batter evenly amongst the two pans and top with the pine nuts. Bake for about 20 minutes or until an inserted skewer comes out mostly clean.