For a super easy dessert that will impress everyone, try making this Caramel Almond Blossom Black Tea flavored creme caramel. It is rich and creamy and it's infused with flavored black tea for a fancy touch of flavor.

For this recipe, we used Caramel Almond Blossom loose leaf tea to add flavor to the creme caramel. It added a delicious caramel flavor and it also deepened the color of this dessert. Overall, it gave an impactful yet delicate twist to this classic.

Creme Caramel

If you've never had creme caramel before, it is a variation of plain custard, where sugar syrup is cooked to a caramel stage and it's poured into the mold before adding the custard base. It is then cooked in a water bath and served turned after cooling so that the caramel runs over the top. Alternatively, it is also called flan and its origin is somewhere around Spain, France, or Italy. It can be made into a large mold or individual ramekins.

Adding Tea Flavor

Tea can be an excellent source of flavor that can be added to many preparations. It adds flavor with no added calories, so it makes a great flavoring ingredient! The most important thing when using tea in preparations is making sure that its flavor comes through. To achieve this, the liquid in which the tea will be steeped needs to come out strong because otherwise, the tea's flavor will turn out to be unnoticed. 

Different liquids such as milk, heavy cream, evaporated milk, almond milk, etc. in which tea can be steeped have different properties than water, which means tea will steep differently in each one of them. It is important to know that liquids with fat content will need more amount of tea and time to produce an impactful flavor. 

A tea concentrate is tea steeped in liquid (water, milk, etc.) that has a very strong flavor. One of the ways to incorporate tea in cooking and baking is through tea concentrates.

For this Caramel Almond Blossom Black Tea creme caramel, the tea leaves were steeped in the evaporated milk to make a concentrate and achieve a strong flavor, which was later used to make the custard.

Ingredients and Tools

This Black Tea flavored creme caramel uses only 5 simple ingredients. For the creme caramel, you just need 1 can of evaporated milk and condensed milk, loose leaf tea, and 4 eggs. And for the caramel, just 1/2 cup of sugar and water.

As for the tools, you can choose to make this creme caramel in one ring cake pan (or tube pan) or several ramekins to make individual portions. You will also need a blender to mix all the ingredients and a small saucepan.

Recipe Notes

The most important part of this recipe is getting to add enough of the tea's flavor into the evaporated milk (and because milk behaves differently than water, the steeping times will vary). To do so, we used 2 heaping tablespoons of Caramel Almond Blossom loose leaf tea per 1 can of evaporated milk and bring it to a simmer in a saucepan for 7 minutes total, from the start of the process. After the 7 minutes, remove the saucepan from the heat and let steep while it cools for an additional 10 minutes.

Most times when you steep tea in some type of milk, it will form a skin, but don't worry because it will be strained. The way to avoid this is to never let the milk reach boiling point, just get it to a simmering point. Still, if the skin does form, wait until the end of the steeping process and strain the skin and tea leaves before proceeding to the next step.

It is crucial to bake it in a water bath, because the hot water distributes the heat evenly around the custard, ensuring that the eggs don't curdle. It also prevents the top from drying out and splitting before the inside is fully cooked. We do this to avoid a rubbery and cracked result.

What if you can't find evaporated milk? Try replacing the total amount of evaporated milk with a combination of half heavy whipping cream and half fresh milk.

Other teas that could work well with this recipe are:

Earl Grey Private Garden
Vanilla Orchid Garden
Sweet Vanilla Chai
Coconut Biscotti

We hope you like and get to make this Caramel Almond Blossom Black tea flavored creme caramel, so you can see for yourself how easy and delicious it is!  Leave as a comment if you do try it or if you have any questions.