La Naissance

This is my first Fauchon tea!! And after one sip, I know this won’t be the last.

Thank you Cavocorax for letting me try yet another company and a delicious tea. Sipping on this is like indulging in a piece of almond cake. It is sweet and oh so nutty. Plus it smells AMAZING! Although, tbh, I could do without so much floral. It is like sitting at a dessert table and adding a bit of the centerpiece to the dish – unnecessary and frankly, a little weird. But in the end, the almond cake flavors do win out so the cup is a pleasant little treat.

In future, I would probably reach for S&V’s Almond Sugar Cookie to get my almond baked good fix but that won’t stop me from happily drinking up each and every last drop of this cup. Thanks again, Cavo!!

Mmm. Yeah, it’s almost 4am and I’ve been up since 3. I’ve made pasta, played with the cats, and almost finished a giant mug of tea.

This is what happens when you crash at 5pm and are sleeping by 6. I even slept in yesterday.

Anyways, the tea is delicious. I got a rose bud and a jasmine flower in my cup today. I understand why Sil has problems with these teas. They all have so many freakin flowers in them! Still, it tastes like almond cake, almost. I like this tea more every time I have it. So glad I was able to find it. :)

Maybe I’ll try to nap or zone out till it’s actually time to get up. It’s tempting to sew, but I don’t want to bother the nice neighbour too much.

I got a wonderful swap package today from Dexter3657!

This was the first baggie I opened and sniffed…probably because I couldn’t tell from the name what it was going to be like, and I saw almond slivers and that piqued my interest. Anyway, after sniffing I had to steep some up immediately! There was a rose bud and jasmine blossom in my steeper, and the rose unfurled seductively as it steeped. Man, this tea is downright sexy! It tastes like an almond pastry of some kind, with just a hint of floral. Heavenly! I might prefer this one to everyone’s beloved Brioche from American Tea Room, but I’ll have to try them side by side to be sure. I have one cup left of Brioche and 2 or so left of this sample :)

Thanks again, Dex!

Thanks so much to OMGsrsly for passing some of this down! I was a little afraid of this one from the beginning when I read that there’s jasmine in here, but luckily, I cannot taste or smell it at all.

But what I do smell in the bag is Turkish Delight and cake! The cake is subtle but it definitely teases you. It’s not at all like your flavoured teas from David’s, or Della Terra, or H&S, but rather, the flavours are natural.

Flavour? Oh yeah, Turkish Delight! The almond is very subtle but I don’t mind that at all. I’m also enjoying this without any additives because why ruin a good thing.

I’ll admit, when all the Fauchon reviews started rolling in, I thought they might be overpriced and overrated, but honestly, they’re better than I thought they would be.

If only Winners would stop being stupid faces and start carrying Fauchon again.

Thanks so much to MissB for acquiring this tin of tea for me and sending it along. I believe this tea appeared in their collection just after I left Paris earlier this year, and I was kicking myself the whole time. SO glad that I got some of it from the Great Fauchon Invasion of North America 2013, because this tea is outstanding.

First off, it smells like heaven. So much almond, with a hint of rose. This is a little like Teavana’s Amandine Rose, if that tea were more amazingly awesome. Sweet, almondy in an almond cookie/cake way. There is enough almond flavor to really say almond pastry of some kind, but it’s not quite marzipan-y. The rose isn’t strong (for me) and just adds a faint air of rosewater, or perhaps turkish delight. There are Greek almond cookies that are made with orange blossom water and so have a light floral note to them, and this is like those cookies if they were made with rosewater instead (which sounds amazing to me but my boyfriend would hate it, haha).

The base is smooth and fairly rich, and absolutely not bitter or astringent despite me steeping it at boiling instead of 95°C. So glad I have a whole 100g of this because I am in love!

The flavouring in this tea is like a cross between Italian Torrone and Turkish Delight. I quite like it, but I find that if you want the flavouring to pop brew it for less than the recommended four or 5 minutes. I can definitely taste the marzipan which blends well with a slightly fruity, slightly bitter rose and Jasmine. For those who hate floral teas this is not overly floral, it’s more candy like. The almond flavour is part marzipan, part nougat and part cake ( if you’ve had a cake baked with almond flour). It is not overly sweet, which is nice as I prefer to be able to sweeten a tea to my own tastes. The Tea is quite pretty with a scattering of rose buds, jasmine pieces and sliced almonds. The base is a chinese black but it brews up to that thick sort of consistency that assams often have.

The tea brews up to a dark amber and smells of a rich white cake. The base tea underneath brews up to a thick, slightly tannic and malty fruity tea. It adds a slightly bready texture to the tea and would handle milk or cream well. I find that if allowed to brew too long the base overtakes the flavouring of the tea.

The tea re-steeps nicely. The more I sip this tea it reminds me of cake, which is nice and fitting since it’s my ‘jour de naissance’.

mmmmm i like this tea a bunch, though i’ve found picking the flowers out makes it a more enjoyable cup. It’s not that it’s a floral tea persay, but something about the blossoms adds just a little of something i dont enjoy AS much. Over all though, this is a lovely tea and i’m glad winners had it when they had their fauchon teas. I did swing by the other day and their shelves were nearly BARE of coffee and tea…so i’m hoping that means more will be coming in soon….i hope lol

wrote my last exam. blanked for the second half of it. the prof is fascinated by my final project…. column A column B situation? sigh. either 3 weeks of break…. some sedate keener studying and this tea was day 1 of ’it’s done’.

this is a different spin on french tea! fauchon and i called a truce today and i wound up with the tea manifesting as i believe it should. entirely ENTIRELY different from dammann freres, mariage freres and nina’s paris……

a bittersweet marzipan cake. an element of green to it. more nuanced than the others, as opposed to robust. it has a disconcerting thin element to it. now i know that tea isn’t supposed to be thick, and yet somehow i have lots of french teas that somehow carry weight?

just a different evolution in my tea repertoire…. a new volume to add, and a very gracious one at that.

thank you MissB for this celebratory cup. i’m going to keep playing until i’m sort out my steeping parameters =0)

very graceful, very smooth, very new!

This one smells amazing and i thought I’d love it. Unfortunately, the rose petal won out. I am soooooo not a floral/rose tea fan. This is going in my daughters’ drawer. She loves the rose teas.

Thanks Sil!

I probably shouldn’t be drinking tea right now—stuck in bed with some kind of funk bug fatigue I don’t know what, really just need to sleep and let my stomach heal—but I couldn’t resist trying something from the box Dexter3657 sent me (Thank you!! It is the best possible first un-secret swap I could have hoped for, truly…made my whole day turn from blah to yay). She was super thoughtful and sent me some Fauchon (!!!!) as she knew I loved the company, and it was all the sweeter because I spent the cold dark weekend hunting TJ Maxx and Marshall’s stores for some to no avail. Dexter3657 noted in her letter that this one “smells amazing” and whoa, that’s no joke. It is heady, the most true-marzipan aroma I’ve ever gotten from a tea and probably even a candy or baked good. Wow. And it does that thing the other Fauchon teas I’ve tried so far do, where the aroma doesn’t translate into over-the-top flavor so much as it drifts and haunts the taste of smooth light but not watery (this is where I think Kusmi and Fauchon differ) black tea in a way that isn’t disappointing (at least not to me!) at all, rather elegant and exquisite. The aroma turns into a lingering aftertaste at the tail end of a sip full of nice ladylike black tea. Love it! My infatuation with artfully perfumed French teas shows no sign of letting up. Thanks again Dexter3657!