Cooking with Tea?

So over spring break a friend of mine and I had just come from a movie and decided that we should bake some treats for a picnic we had in the morning.  One of her friends had just dropped off some tea from her aunts business and told us to try baking with it.  We picked a mango tea for a carrot cake, a peach tea for the white cake, a passion tea for the angel cake, and mango again for the fondant.  We were in a semi rush since it was getting late and we had a lot to do, so we brewed all the teas and lined up the cake mixes.  While she did the cakes, I started on the fondant.  Well... This was a horrible idea all together because the cakes would not come out of their pans at all and they tasted like nothing.  Plus the fact that the fondant we made stuck to everything like hard candy so we ended up in the kitchen till 2 AM sweeping and mopping and scrubbing off our sweet mistakes.  But there is a silver lining to this story, even though we had to throw away all the angel cake and 3 cups worth of fondant, not to mention pans that have cake eternally stuck to their sides and a sugar coated sink, we did have a sliver of success left.  After we finished swiffering the confectionafied floor we decided, even though we were drop dead tired, to try to frost our little carrot cake. This was apparently a great idea because we ended up with a little(big) square of pink, with glitter sprinkle and a pink lining, all served up on a pretty little heart plate.  After that we pretty much passed out for about six hours until it was time to get up and ready for our picnic adventure.  While she gathered up a few more supplies for the picnic I decided to give the cupcakes, our last baked mistake left, another shot.  So I filled up a baggie with chocolate frosting and got piping.  I finished them of with metallic sprinkles, we figured if they could taste good they should at least look good.  Which they apparently did because a lot of people seemed to like them just based on looks.  Thankfully we convinced most people to take some, leaving us with very few.  Needless to say we took the rest of the day off to get some snacks and relax.

Starbucks Vs. Peet's

Starbucks is by far one of the most popular coffee shops as of right now.  It is a very popular meet up place to grab a drink with some friends, or to grab a treat before school.  It is hard to drive more than a mile without passing one, they are practically on every corner.  But I personally do not really like Starbucks coffee.  I think that the pricing is incredibly high and ridiculous for one. Also the whole sizing deal, the meaning of the words "tall" and "venti" don't really correspond with the actual cup size, along with the fact that the languages that the sizes are in don't really correspond.  That's just my opinion though.  I personally prefer Peet's coffee and tea for my go to tea or coffee run.  I think that at Starbucks your really just paying for the name, there's nothing that special about it at all.  As you can see by the menus below Peet's is a bit pricier but I honestly think its worth it.  Just in general though, I think all coffee shops are overpiced just because they can.  So if your ever craving a specific drink that you think you can only get from Starbucks, try these Starbucks recipes.  http://starbuckssecretmenu.net/