Enchanted Narnia Panna Cotta

Last week my sister Bip visited for a long week-end and being a tea aficionado and a big fan of Bird & Blend Tea Company, she'd booked us both to a tea blending class. This was a very nice experience and in addition to learning lots about tea and creating our own mixtures, the trainers provided a lot of useful tips, one among these was the cold infusion of their Enchanted Narnia tea blend with coconut milk. Now, how could I possibly resist this? This tea blend tastes of Turkish delight and is very pretty to look at in its dry form.

So without further ado, I put 8 tsp of the Enchanted Narnia tea into a large jug and poured in 1 litre of coconut milk over the tea. Now, this tea mixture has lots of dried rose buds and they bobbed up to the surface, so I had to stir for a few minutes to get things mixed in a little bit. Then I covered with cling film and left the jug in the fridge at least overnight.

The next day, I strained some of the cold infusion into a glass and tasted it. It was a very nice, though the coconut of the milk was still the dominating flavour and it tasted way too creamy to drink just like it was. I decided to leave the mixture for a further 24 h in the hope that the Turkish delight flavour would develop further. It did and I gave some to Lundulph to try. He thought it was nice too, but again commented on how overly creamy it seemed to be.

And so it struck me - why not use this to make a panna cotta? A quick search cropped up this recipe that seemed very promising. I made some changes to the ingredients's list and I deliberately didn't heat up the infused coconut milk, so that the flavours wouldn't change - a hot tip from the chocolate course I attended a couple of years back.

Ingredients

3.5 leaves gelatine
300 ml single cream
1 tsp vanilla essence
30 g caster sugar
300 ml infused coconut milk

Method

1. Soak the gelatine leaves in a little cold water for a few minutes.
2. Place the cream, vanilla essence and sugar in a saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved.
3. Remove from the heat. Squeeze out the gelatine leaves and stir into the saucepan and keep stirring until it has dissolved.
4. Let the mixture cool down to around 40 °C and stir in the infused coconut milk.
5. Pour into a suitable mould, let cool completely, cover with cling film and place in the fridge to set.

This turned out absolutely delicious. I suspect regular milk would work just as well. Sadly I forgot to take a photo.

To follow, I decided to try the cold infusion with hazelnut milk, however this wasn't as nice, the hazel flavour was just too overpowering. So I've been using it in my coffee and it tastes different, but rather nice I think.