Chado Chocolate Chai @ The Gourmet Company

After sampling the Sain's Market Chocolate Peanut Butter, I had some lovely chocolate chai to look forward to, courtesy The Gourmet Company. For those who don't know, The Gourmet Company is a delightful online store that stocks some of the finest gourmet foods. You'll find  hand-made gourmet pasta, organic honeys and jams, cheeses, healthy cereal bars, muesli, baking things and exotic and rare teas and coffees. From their selection of fine beverages, I was sent some funky chocolate tea to sample.

Chado (pronounced Sa-do; the Japanese way of tea) is a product of the Chado Tea Room, an LA-based tea room which serves and produces a vast range of exotic teas. The Gourmet Company stocks some of their finest and the Chocolate Chai is easily one of the most unusual things on their site.

The tea is extremely aromatic and the scent of chocolate equally potent when you first open the pack. You can actually see the chocolate chips if you look carefully among the tea leaves. The pack calls for 2 teaspoons per cup, steeped for 4-5 minutes. I tried that with the first pack, but it turned bitter. The black brew looks like regular tea, but it was definitely not my cuppa tea! :D

I tried the second sample with milk and sugar, having steeped it for a about 3 minutes, and it was an entirely different story. Full-bodied and distinctly chocolaty, the Chado Chocolate Chai is one of the most unique beverages I've ever had. For tea purists, it might seem a little odd,  but a chocolate lover can easily get used to it. Full marks for this lovely product to Chado for making it and The Gourmet Company for keeping it.

RATING: 4/5

Chocosophy news: Chocolate teas, portraits and breakfasts

Chocolate pixels make this Obama portrait

 
Sixteen freshmen from Israel's Holon Institute of Technology made this portrait of the POTUS or the President of the United States, Barack Obama recently. Made using 1172 'pixels' of white, milk and dark chocolate, this  portrait is a recreation of Obama's 2008 presidential campaign poster. The students presented Obama with this work of art along with a letter saying their lives too were "full of dreams and hopes" in the context of Israel's (perpetual) unrest. Well, now that's a sweet way of driving home a point! (Source)

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An all-chocolate breakfast worth 8724 calories!!!

Epic Meal Time, the new instructional cooking show whipped up this crazy all-chocolate breakfast that clocks in 380 gm of fat and 8724 calories! Basically, don't eat for the next two days if you go for this one. The creator chefs mixed in and coated bacon, eggs and potatoes with Nesquik powder, hollowed out sausages to fill them with Hershey's chocolate syrup, pancakes with double fudge chocolate in the batter and the French Toast stuffed with Nutella! The breakfast, of course, has to be washed down with a chocolate milkshake. If this isn't evil, I don't know what is.

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UK twins create chocolate-flavoured tea

This one should be happy news for tea (and of course chocolate) lovers. Newcastle-based twins Jodi and Stella Kean started experimenting with different kinds of teas after their tea bar business failed to take off. Stella told Express, “When the lease on the shop fell through we came up with the idea for choclateas. I don’t think people realise how many calories and how much sugar is in a cup of hot chocolate. We wanted to create something that felt like a treat but was healthy .”

“The main taste you get is tea, followed by the undertone of the flavour, such as pure dark chocolate and cocoa powder in the traditional-style choclatea,” Stella continued. Each cup has less than 20 calories, and other flavours in this range include chilli chocolate, peppermint chocolate, vanilla chocolate and wild berry chocolate. The range will be launched in the UK next month.