Jasmine has a hint of a fruity, almost apricot-like aspect. So I felt inspired to try this combination, using infused jasmine tea leaves as a fragrant variation for my classic Apricot & Almond Torte, in which jasmine tea has been infused into the cake and also added to the top of the cake in the form of a drizzled icing.

10 Tbs. salted butter, room temperature
2/3 Cup sugar
1/4 tsp. Haitian vanilla extract
3 eggs
1 cup unbleached white flour
1 cup almond meal (100gr)
2 tsp. double acting baking powder, or 1 package German Backpulver
1/2 cup STRONG jasmine tea, at room temperature (see more on that below)
1 Tbs finely chopped, infused (wet) jasmine tea leaves
About a dozen fresh apricots – or enough of them to cover the cake’s surface

For the icing:
3 Tbs icing sugar, sifted
1 Tbs strong jasmine tea at room temperature
A few drops of freshly squeezed lemon juice

Preparation:

• To prepare the jasmine tea, infuse 1 cup of water at 175F with 1Tbs of fine and fragrant green jasmine tea or dragon pearls. Infuse for no more than 2-3min to avoid it becoming too bitter, and reserve the brewed tea leaves to add to the cake later, and also for serving more with the cake once its baked!
• Use an 11 inch springform pan, lined with parchment paper.
• Cream the butter with the sugar and vanilla extract.
• Beat in eggs, one at a time.
• Sift the flour with the baking powder Beat into the egg mixture. Add the buttermilk and mix well.
• Add the chopped-up, infused jasmine tea leaves
• Spread the batter into the baking pan.
• Place the apricots on top, slightly overlapping, with the cut side facing UP.
• Bake at 350°F for 30-40 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out pretty clean (as long as you don’t insert it through the fruit!)
• Prepare the icing by stirring all the ingredients with a fork or a mini wire whisk
• Once the cake cooled down, drizzle with the jasmine tea icing, and scatter a some whole, infused jasmine tea leaves for decoration on the top.
• Keeps well for a 2-3 days (if it lasts!). If you refrigerate, bring to room temperature before serving.

We had jasmine bushes growing in abundance in my village - almost in every household's garden. Even my frugal family - which had a strict policy about growing only useful things such as vegetables, medicinal herbs and and fruit trees - had one growing at our courtyard in front of the house. The poor little bush would release its intoxicating aroma even when it looked rather miserable. It never seems to give up on flowering, at any given season,  And at one point I was tempted to make a cup of homemade jasmine tea, simply by letting a single flower float on top of my cup of boiled water. It smelled like heaven, tasted as bitter as death, and left my tongue numb!

The technique of perfuming tea with flowers is an ancient art that was invented in China. During the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD), J. sambac from Persia arrived in China. By the 5th Centruy, teas were already perfumed with jasmine flowers. But it wasn't until the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) that jasmine tea because popular the world over due to its introduction to the West.

By nature's own divine wisdom, tea gardens fortunately grow in close proximity to where some fragrant flowers can also thrive. All shades of tea can be perfumed with jasmine, including silver needle, red tea and oolong - but the most popular of them is jasmine green tea.

The technique of perfuming tea was originally developed to enhance the aroma of lower quality leaf, but because of demand and growing appreciation for this particular flavour, there are now many different grades, forms and qualities available, especially for jasmine tea.



Green jasmine tea is mostly produced in Fujian province in China, and is harvested in September - the prime time for jasmine sambac flowers in the region. The tea leaves and flowers are harvested at dawn. The tea goes a partial process, up to the stage of "fixing" by heat. While the tea leaves are still humid they are layered alternately to form an inch-thick carpet with fresh jasmine flowers. These flowers are left there for about 24 hours so that the tea leaves can absorb their perfume. The tea leaves are then heated for an hour to set the fragrance in, and the flowers are then removed before they begin to decompose so that the scent does not deteriorate. This same process will be repeated with a new batch of flowers, between 2-6 times. Between 30-50 kg of flowers are required to perfume 100 kg of undried tea leaves.
The flowers themselves have a bitter taste when brewed, which is why they are removed. You'll rarely find a jasmine blossom in a high quality jasmine tea. Poor quality and aromatized teas will have plenty of those, as if to convince the naive buyer that they are the real deal. Originally, the process of perfuming teas was created to improve the taste and aroma of medium quality teas. It was only later on that mediocre or worse quality teas were aromatized - in other words, sprayed with a manmade flavouring to enhance their taste and mask their poor quality. Sometimes these are easy to recognize because they have some dried jasmine flowers added later on for decoration and marketing purposes.



Jasmine tea is recommended for pairing with coconut desserts, and in general all mildly sweetened Asian desserts go fantastically well with it, which is possibly why you'll be served a pot of jasmine tea as soon as you sit down for dim-sum. It is also served to accompany the pho - the deliciously light Vietnamese noodle soups, where the jasmine's aroma beautifully complements the fresh cilantro and basil leaves. Jasmine Tea Mooncakes (pictured above) are a traditional food of the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrated in mainland China, Taiwan, Vietnam and among Chinese communities the world over. It's a pastry that is filled a paste or a cream made of taro root or lotus-seed or a variety of other modern interpretations, to which other flavours (such as tea, fruits, nuts, and more recently also coffee and chocolate) can be added.



For Jade Jasmine Pearls, the choicest tea leaf is selected: a tiny twig with the entire bud and two leaves (similar to Bai Mu Dan, AKA White Peony), which are impregnated with jasmine's perfume and rolled into a pearl-sized ball.

Jasmine Silver Needle is a fine white tea in which the tender leaves are picked when they are still closed. They look like a needle, and their silvery fuzz in clear sight, which explains their name. In the brewing process, these tiny silver hairs separate form the leaves and float to the top of the cup, creating a beautiful light-reflecting shimmer that adds to the visual enjoyment of the tea. Some flowers may be found in these teas, but this is from a different variety that is not as bitter.

Jasmine Green Tea is the most popular, and the one that you will most likely find in an adulterated form. Watch out for tea blends that have many blossoms in them - these usually serve only a decorative purpose (most jasmine flowers do not retain their aroma after drying), and are a visual clue that the tea is, in fact, aromatized.



Jasmine Black Tea is rare, and usually scented with a unique, fragrant variety of yellow jasmine, Jasminum odoratissimum is a Madeira (Portugal) variety but due to its quality of retaining its fragrance after drying, it is also grown in Formosa (Taiwan) where it is used to perfume tea. I've only encountered black jasmine tea in the form of hand-tied teas.



Hand-Tied Teas come in a variety of flavours, colours and designs that open up only after the "tea bud" is steeped in water for a while. The flower unfolds like a slow-motion time-lapse of a blooming bud. For best visual effect, use a clear glass teapot to brew this tea. They can be re-steeped many times, provided they are fresh.

Jasmine Beer: I've had the pleasure to experience a Jasmine IPA (Indian Pale Ale) from Steamworks, a local craft brewery located near the Waterfront Station in Gastown. It is hoppy in the most refreshing, fruity-bitter manner, which only accentuates the subtle jasmine tea notes that are hidden within. I see that there are many other jasmine IPAs produced by craft breweries. But if you can't get your paws on one, you can brew your own Jasmine Kombucha (see recipe below).

Jasmine Kombucha: When I learned that you could, in fact, used flavoured teas for kombucha brewing, I thought that my mind was going to explode from happiness (and ideas). Sometimes the best things are the simplest ones. Taking a fine ingredient, and making it even finer by a traditional, tried-and-true process. The key here is to have a good, healthy kombucha, and use the finest jasmine tea you can get. Another important component of a successful flavoured kombucha-making is that if you are using flavours, only to make them occasionally. The oils in flavoured teas do not add to the health of the culture. So you must alternate between making flavoured ones to plain ones. Follow the recipe for kombucha provided on this blog, using high quality jasmine-scented tea. You may also use flowering (hand-tied) teas, though this may be a bit of a waste of a beautiful thing (visually speaking).

As much as I love to hate Tom Ford and his excessiveness (especially with anything noir and/or oud-related) - when it comes to floral his artistic direction is just right. Velvet Gardenia is haunting, beautiful and with an intriguing candle-wax and labdanum base notes; and Shanghai Lily unusual yet strangely pretty. While I was a bit disappointed with Champaca Absolute's intensely fruity-fresh and shampoo-like quality, I still find it oddly interesting, and many of the other seasonal floral releases were intriguing even if not enough to warrant a full bottle purchase (that only happened with Velvet Gardenia), and the entire floral Jardin Noir collection (with purple label) smelled promising, namely Café Rose and Ombre de Hyacinth - even I did not get around to try them on yet.

I didn't make much of Jasmin Rouge when I tested it on scent strip at Holt Renfrew, where I was also given a sample of it just because they had one in stock. It just did not smell like jasmine on paper, so I didn't bother trying it on my skin. Admittedly, it was not until this jasmine series and noticing it was mentioned favourably in a few jasmine features by other blogs. They were right. Jasmin Rouge turned out to be one of if not the best jasmine perfume I've sampled in the last three weeks. It was created by nose Rodrigo Flores-Roux, a most prolific and productive perfumer who knows both how to create expressive florals, rich orientals and effervescent fresh and citrusy fragrances: He is the nose behind the magnificent Anima Dulcis (Arquiste), and many other fragrances for that line including L'Etrog; Donna Karan's Black Cashmere, Essence Wenge and Essence Labdanum, and too many others to count. He has already worked with Tom Ford on Neroli Portofino (in 2011, the same year as Jasmin Rouge was launched in conjunction with a make up collection - hence the names such as "Santal Blush" and "Jasmin Rouge"), and more recently (2013) Fleur de Chine.


Jasmin Rouge is a realistically convincing yet imaginative jasmine. It begins with a strong, unmistakable jasmine cloud, as if you've just passed a bush full of flowers while blindfolded, and taken by a pleasant surprise. Next you might notice an emphasis on fruity notes - plum, apricot and peach, but these are very grown-up fruits, nothing like the fruit punches you get in the teeny bopper lip-glosses, but that is not to say the fruit notes are dry or overripe either... They are subtle accents  that give the perfume an  deliciously juicy, almost edible presence to the otherwise too serious or toxically beautiful white flowers who are the true stars of this fragrance.

Next you'll notice a tuberose/gardenia/orange-blossom quality of methyl anthranilate, which also adds to the juiciness but in a darker, more sinister way (methyl anthranilate also developed in the more advanced stages of the decomposition of corpses). With all that being said, the jasmine maintains its character throughout, but there are some darker notes in there giving it more depth - hints of spices, resins and balsams. The jasmine itself possesses both the qualities of tea and of milky stone fruit, which makes me think of jasmine sambac variety - but I am also smelling jasmine grandiflorum, with its more pronounced indole. If compared to Serge Lutens A La Nuit though, the sambacness of this perfume is a little more pronounced. But on its own, I wouldn't think of it as any particular variety of jasmine.

There is also a hint of a fatty, modern-day lipstick-like quality as the perfume dries down, to prove that this perfume goes to the extreme to promote upscale makeup. And while there are myriads of spices, flowers and even leather and herbs (Clary Sage) listed in the notes, they only perform as accents to the jasmine, which is for a change truly the main focus of the perfume.

Top Notes: Bergamot, Mandarin, Cinnamon, Ginger, Cardamom, Black Pepper, White Pepper
Heart Notes: Jasmine (Sambac and Grandiflorum) Broom, Neroli, Ylang Ylang, Clary Sage
Base: Mexican Vanilla, Labdanum, Leather, Woodsy and Ambery Notes