Héritage Gourmand - Mousse au Chocolat

shmiracles! I will have your little tea babies for this one :) i think there IS magic in this box after all.

So part of the reason i REALLY wanted to try this tea is that there’s an ongoing joke in my family about mousse au chocolat. My grandmere? She was from belgium and back in the day was one of the few woman in her day to train at le cordon bleu. It was there that she learned to make mousse au chocolat. As the story goes, she taught my dad to cook and shared with him the family recipe for mousse au chocolat. My entire life i have heard about my grandmere and her famous mousse au chocolat. Which my dad promised me when i was about 7, he would teach me to make…which he has never made in his life for us…which he still has not taught me how to make. And folks? i LOOOOOVVVEEEEE real mousse au chocolat…not to be confused with “chocolate mousse,” that they often serve in restaurants here in canada…which never seems as delicious as it ought to be…as the mousse au chocolat that i’ve had in france.

So when i found out about this tea via shmiracles, i had to try it AND coicidentally my parents were in Paris at the time. So my dad got an email from me: If you can manage it, i’d love for you to pick up this tea while you’re in Paris. I figure it’s the least you can do since you refuse to share grandmere’s recipe with me. :) All in fun of course. So now they’re back…and i suspect they found it somewhere in Paris, since i clearly challenged my father, but i won’t know until i see them again.

So for now, i’m content with this sample from Shmiracles…which is downright amazing! I lost track of steeping it..but this is delicious. It’s not sweet, it’s more like a rich dark chocolate mousse. i think with a bit of milk and sugar, this would turn into an amazing cup of chocolate goodness, but i love this the way it is. Dark and sinfully delicious.

Edit: resteep of this in the morning is also delicious!

Sipdown, 167.

When I started this note I was angry at having not gotten my car back from the mechanic even though he promised it to me today, but I just got a call and it’s done. This is especially important because I am driving it to DC tomorrow!

Anyway, this tea was made to soothe me… This time I made it strong with milk and sugar and it is deeeelish. So so chocolatey, and more mousse-like now. An indulgence, but a slightly less indulgent than actual chocolate mousse.

2013-05-23
late night. a rare occasion that i’m alone at home. watching Merlin and drinking a Mousse au Chocolat latte in my brand new tea cup.
http://instagram.com/p/Zra-kDIc83/
and here are the strawberries we picked from the garden!
so many!
http://instagram.com/p/ZrTabjoc-k/

2013-04-26
wow there are huge chunks of chocolate in this tea. mega decadent!
and dark. a dark decadent tea. it’ll be easy to drink this one up.
and i bet it will be AMAZING as a latte. like it should be outlawed or something.
dramatic effect.

(further notes redacted)
:P

A tasty treat from Sil!
Thanks!!

I had a cup of this last night while I started working on my French again (Je suis une femme! That’s about all I learned. Oh and the repeated use of Les robes et la pomme sont rouges. Got old. Quickly.)

This one is good though not as awesome as the macaron one. It was chocolatey but subtle about it. The black tea blends in really well with the chocolate flavor, which almost borders more on the taste of cacao nibs or cocoa powder rather than like milk chocolate. I really wanted to add a little milk and sugar but got distracted, so definitely next time to make it a bit more like mousse. It’s definitely really, really rich and decadent.

Thank you shmiracles for this awesome tea!

Another decadently exotic sample from Shmiracles.

I was pretty excited about this one. the leaves look and smell good enough to eat! The brewed cup isn’t quite so decadent (for me, anyway). It’s got a sort of tart or liquor-like flavor about it. The chocolate is there, but I’m not too fond of liquor flavor with occasional exceptions. I was hoping for more of a creamy backdrop for the chocolate.

But this really is all for the best. I still fear the day when I am tempted to spend more on shipping than on the tea in order to get it from afar!

Basically the closest that tea can get to hot chocolate. Almost (only almost!) could take care of my chocolate cravings. It’s downright cocoa-y. I did not try this without milk, so of course that could have added quite a bit of creaminess to it. I’m really enjoying it – definitely a successful chocolate-flavored black.

And yet another CharlotteZero sample. This is definitely one of the better (and more authentic) chocolate teas I’ve had. It’s slightly bitter, like real dark chocolate, and smooth and rich. Chocolate teas aren’t really my thing, but even so if this weren’t so expensive I might consider picking some up in the future. Given how pricey the Héritage Gourmand tins are, though, I probably won’t.

I really wanted to try the Raspberry Mousse de Chocolat from MissB, but I figured it was probably a better idea to try the plain chocolate version for comparrison’s sake. So I made up a mug of this with some milk in it.

With the inclusion of milk this tastes spectacularly like chocolate milk; especially the more it cools down. I’m not a big chocolate tea lover, especially when blends use chocolate chips over cacao shells or nibs, but I’m enjoying this one. It’s pretty darn rich with a smooth black base and silky mouthfeel. Milk only enhances this!

I don’t think I’d want to stock this one because of how simple it is and because I know I don’t crave chocolate teas that often, and am starting to prefer straight blacks with cocoa notes over flavoured cocoa teas. But this is well done regardless, chocoholics would like it! It makes me excited for its raspberry counterpart as well! The inclusion of another flavour will greatly round this one out, in my opinion.

A huge thank you to VariaTEA for giving me a sample of this tea! I’ve been super curious, but haven’t had the chance to really get my hands on any of this previously.

The dry tea smells very chocolatey, and cacao nibs are clearly visible – I don’t always like the inclusion of cacao nibs for whatever reason, and the smell of the blend came off to me as a bit fakey, so I was prepared not to overly care for it. Sadly, I was a bit wrong. It’s way better steeped. Like liquid dark, fruity chocolate. Maybe a touch artificial, but it’s so rich and creamy. And dark. I do quite like it. Not enough to pay the extravagant prices that it costs, though, but it will remain in my head as a great chocolate tea to recommend. The only thing that would maybe make it better would be some cacao shell and perhaps a bit of base tea roastiness. (But then I’m probably turning it into LBCG… which is my all-time chocolate favourite).

(Oh, also I steeped this for 4 minutes by accident. It was fine. So the black base here is clearly pretty forgiving.)