Pairing Cakes with Tea

If you love tea, and you want to know what food goes well with tea, you simply can’t miss out on delicious cakes. Yet, every cake is different and depending on the taste profile, you’ll want to pair with the right tea. For tea and dessert pairings purposes, cakes can be divided into 3 types: fruity, chocolate, and cheese cakes.

Fruit cakes and tea pairing

Fruity desserts such as strawberry cakes one of the most popular types of cakes, but pairing them with tea isn’t always easy. A strong black tea easily flushes way the fruitiness, which isn’t the effect you want. A way more compatible tea is white tea. Young loose leaf white teas have flowery and fruity notes. The flowery aroma perfectly complements the strawberry and lemon cakes.

If the fruity cake is also somewhat savoury, then go for aged white tea. Aged whites taste more like ripe fruit, which will suit a savoury fruit came more than flowery notes of young white tea.

Chocolate cakes and tea pairing

When pairing tea with a chocolate cake, what you want to focus on is: matching intensity. If you’re serving a white or milk chocolate style cake, then go for a more delicate black tea such as jin jun mei. It’s a famous black tea from Fujian that contains entirely out of golden buds.

Yet, when you’ve a dark chocolate cake or mousse, you should match the intensity with a ripe pu erh tea. Such a tea tastes earthy and dark with a very smooth mouthfeel so you can beautifully drink down that chocolate flavour that’s in the mouth.

Cheese cakes and tea pairing

Tea and cheese? Honestly, we really were scratching our heads when we’re asked this question for the first time. If you’re not gonna experiment with this in practice, you’re not gonna get answers. When it comes to pairing cheese cakes with tea, imagination is simply not gonna help you.

What we discovered, is that cheese flavours go extremely well with a Dragon well teas (or ‘Longjing’) and other nutty type of green teas. This is a tea from the West Lake region near Hangzhou, China. However, when you select a Dragon well tea, you need to make sure you’re getting the right type. In China, Longjings are roughly categorised in nutty and bean-like types. For pairing with cheese cakes, you want to make sure you’re getting the nutty type, with a stronger roast to match the taste of cheese. Longjings with a bean-style aroma are simply too delicate to enjoy together with sweet desserts.