Héritage Gourmand - Mousse au Chocolat

Wow, I’ve been neglecting these generous Héritage Gourmand samples from boychik (and originally CharlotteZero). To be fair, I’ve amassed a giant mound of flavored tea samples, especially since I started doing my tea rehoming. I was sorting through them today and this sounded amazing, so I had to try it. The black leaves are small and very dark, and there’s a generous amount of cacao nibs mixed in. Dry scent is sweet chocolate heaven, a mixture of milk and dark varieties. I let a heaping teaspoon steep for 3 minutes at 200 degrees. I think I might let it go longer next time.

Mm, the aroma is intoxicating! Creamy milk chocolate combined with the richness of dark chocolate. And the taste is spot-on as well! The texture is somewhat thick and luscious, almost like actual Mousse au Chocolat. I added a teensy bit of raw sugar to mine. I would say it’s mostly milk chocolate here, but there’s a touch of rich dark chocolate mixed in to give depth. It’s creamy and delicious and chocolate heaven! I can’t even imagine how amazing this would be with milk added.

A few months back, my roommate made real Mousse au Chocolat. Not the kind that is made with milk chocolate and served with whipped cream. She made REAL Mousse au Chocolat that was rich and decadent and full of dark, dark chocolate. This tastes exactly like that. Exactly. Though it also has a liqueur type quality to it that is very nice. Delicious! Thank you Sil for the opportunity to try this tea!!

This tea was kinda disappointment . I probably didn’t brew it right. 195F 5 min produced slightly chocolate flavored water. I just couldn’t figure out parameters fr my Steepster fellows. I had such high hopes. Oh well…
I have 1 tsp left to experiment.
Thank you so much CharlotteZero for sending me many amazing samples. I don’t see your notes lately, but I hope you will come back. Miss you <3

I must say that I’m feeling a lot better this morning. I felt a lot better yesterday afternoon, actually. I obviously can’t get into too much detail, but suffice it to say that the entire world seems like such a different place when you are disabled and actually have the tools to do your work accessibly. i was in a right panic yesterday morning, and was on the verge of a most unsightly meltdown (those are necessary sometimes, actually), but managed to resolve the situation without feeling like running away to some sort of Victorian novel fantasy island. But when isn’t that in the works? haha.

I’d read such amazing reviews on this tea, and charlotte0 was so thoughtful to include it in the package she sent me. I have to admit I was a bit hesitant, simply because I think I largely fall into the “if i want to be drinking chocolate, I’ll have hot chocolate with all the fixings!” category. But I also know that MF knows what they’re doing, so I took a chance. Brewed it up for about four minutes, threw in some milk and sugar, and set to work enjoying it. And my my, this is a most delicious cup of tea. The chocolate blends so perfectly with the base. By that I mean that you know how with some teas, you’re like “oh hello flavour. Oh, hello there, base!”? but with this, I knew I was drinking a chocolate flavoured tea, but the base was just there, all unobtrusive and coy, and not being like “ooooh! guess what base I am! guess guess! where am I from? what do I do? who do I know??!! come on! heelloooooo!!”. And the chocolate tasted as though it was of the highest quality and I felt quite spoiled indeed.

Thank you, charlotte 0. This is going straight on my shopping list for my eventual mf haul!

Oh mon dieu. C’etait un the tres delicieux.

My French is slightly (lots) rusty despite living in a bilingual province. Also it loses all meaning without the very important accents which my iPad will not include.

I got this one last year from Shmiracles and I have to say that even though I stopped drinking tea when I lost interest as an ironic pregnant woman, once in a while I would peek in my stash of samples and get excited when I saw this one (and some others she sent direct from France). I’ve been working on getting my tea mojo back and tonight I decided it was finally time to crack this one open.

I was watching Face Off (the awesome tv show, not the cheesily awesome Travolta/Cage movie of the same name) with my husband when I made the call.

So I opened the package and sniffed it and ohhhh mannnnnn….chocolate! I’ve never had a REAL chocolate mousse before, like a good French one… In fact, I googled a recipe to see how hard it would be to make, based on the smell of this I know I’d love it. Here’s a Julia Child recipe I found, in case you were curious:

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2008/05/perfect-chocola/

So the taste was also very very good. No doubt about the chocolate. And though I’ve never had the “REAL” good stuff, I swear this actually smelled like chocolate mousse rather than just generic chocolate tea number 47.

I was wondering if, like Wedding Imperial, it would get super strong really quickly, but it didn’t, I actually ended up steeping it longer because I wasn’t satisfied with the color. Maybe I didn’t use enough leaves but obviously I’m trying to make it last because I’m not sure I will ever be able to afford ordering this directly from France to stock it for myself!

So, if I had one complaint, I guess that it would be I would have liked it to be a bit more full bodied, like wedding imperial. A tea like that can be resteeped X amount of times because you get a strong tea out of a short infusion. I suppose some people find that’s a negative, a picky black base, but with expensive teas at least you get your money’s worth!

Basically, if you’re looking for a dessert tea, this is it. I don’t always want a dessert tea these days, I guess because I’d rather eat actual dessert with a plainer black tea as an accompaniment, but drinking this would be a better option for the waistline for sure :)

I should add that as usual(lately), I added a splash of milk to my cup. It watered it down a bit but also probably helped bring out the creaminess.

I will try to resteep the leftovers tomorrow to see how it goes.

All in all I am grateful to Shmiracles for allowing me to try this, even though it took me a year to get around to it!

The dry leaf smells very much like what I would imagine a dark chocolate liquor would smell, and the steeped tea smells likewise. After it was first brewed and I was allowing it to cool however, I could swear it smelled just like Tootsie rolls…Quite the opposite of the gourmet experience this tea was aiming at. This impression didn’t last long, though. There is a sourness in both this and in Florence that reminds me more of alcohol than it reminds me of the bitterness of dark chocolate. I don’t know what I would do to improve my experience of these teas. Perhaps soy milk…?