Make Your Own Tea Bags

Today we're going to make tea bags!

I discovered how amazing tea was during law school.  More specifically, I discovered that tea comes not only in Earl Grey and Green varieties, but that there are entire shops devoted to selling hundreds of different varieties.  My recent favourite is Jolly Jellybean from David's Tea.  It has jelly belly jellybeans in it (I'm a sucker for a gimmick), and tastes divine.

While I enjoy tea, I find it hard to enjoy at school if it's loose leaf.  I've been running a nouveau apothecary out of my locker for the past few years, with jars of tea and tea scoops and the like packed onto a shelf.  I have concluded however that this is a silly way to go about things - it's messy and it takes up valuable real estate that could be used to house my inordinately large paper copy of the Income Tax Act.

According to the internet, it's all the rage nowadays to make your own tea bags.  They seemed like a lot of work though, and I'm more of an instant gratification sort of gal.  But they did seem like a great way to stop scooping loose leaf tea at school.  So I decided to improve on the method.

My mom started buying me tea supplies for Christmas a few years ago, which is how I learned about disposable tea filters.  Most tea shops sell them, and they run you 5-6 dollars a box.  

These filters got me to thinking about how I could more easily go about making my own tea bags if I used the prefabricated filter as my base.  No complex sewing would be required, and it would end up doing the same job in the end.  I gave it a whirl, and it was quite a success!  Since it worked out for me, I wanted to share it with you all.

First, you'll need some supplies:

Scissors

Pen

Stapler

Baker's Twine (There's a great tutorial on how to make your own at http://www.niftythriftythings.com/2012/01/diy-bakers-twine.html)

A set of tea bag labels - you can download the ones that I made here

Loose Tea

Tea Measuring Scoop

Tea Filter bags (I use T-Sac, but any brand will do.)

Instructions:
1. Cut 6" lengths of twine until you have one for every tea bag you want to make.

2. Scoop out your loose leaf tea with the tea scoop and place it in the filter bag (Like you would normally do when making a cup of tea).

3. Folding the Bag

3.1 Fold the bag to make a line just above where the tea ends in the bag. Unfold.

3.2 Fold the bag to the right, folding it so that the edge is even with the first fold that you made.  Unfold.

3.3 Fold the bag to the left, folding it so that the edge is even with the first fold that you made.

3.4 Fold the right side of the bag over the left, using the folding lines you made in step 2, to form a triangle.

3.5 Trim off any excess filter bag that extends beyond the line of the fold you made in step 1.

3.6 Fold the tip of the triangle down halfway towards the edge of the triangle.

3.7 Fold the top of the bag down to the edge of the triangle.

4. Attaching the Twine

4.1 Unfold the top of the bag and slip the twine under the triangle, so that it sticks out to the side.
4.2 draw the string back towards the middle of the bag, and then up towards the end of the bag.
4.3 Re-fold down the edge of the bag.
4.4 Draw the twine/floss down towards you, and then put a staple on top of the twine.

5. All that's left to do after that is to write the name of the tea on a tea bag label, then staple your label onto the end of the twine.   

Repeat until you have a enough tea to last you a while.

And then enjoy the fruits of your labour!

They're certainly not the easiest way to enjoy a cup of tea, but they do allow you to enjoy more exotic blends when you're at work or at school.

Quick and Easy Sugar Cookie Bars

After an extremely successful reading week full of crafting, I have decided to start blogging about my crafting and baking adventures (Josh thinks it would be a good creative outlet for me, and I tend to agree).  My recent success with concocting my own recipes and craft patterns has also inspired me, so that I may share these crafty findings with a wider audience.  

So, without further ado, I will begin with baking (because this is the first project I've remembered to photograph along the way).

As a law student, I spent an inordinate amount of time on Pinterest.  While generally not leading to any socially useful endeavour, it occasionally winds up leading me to a great recipe or pattern.  A few weeks ago I stumbled upon sugar cookie bars on Pinterest.  It was a life changing moment.  I can have sugar cookies with less than a 2 day cookie baking  marathon? Sign me up!

I gave them a go... and met with failure.  My cookies were woefully undercooked, and kind of tasted like flour.  Thinking that that particular recipe might just not be for me, I plied my Google-fu in an attempt to find variations on the sugar cookie bar.  I came to the startling conclusion that, although there are numerous sites with sugar cookie bar recipes on them, they're all the exact same recipe.

It was at this point that I decided to get creative.  I was handed down a delicious sugar cookie recipe from my Grandma Smith.  I knew the cookie itself was delicious, so it seemed a better sample recipe to test cookies in bar form.  So in the end, I used my Grandma Smith's sugar cookie recipe, and just modified the cook time to bake them in bar form.  Quite happily, I met with great success!

I would now like to share that success with you.  They're super easy to bake, and they'll make you the hit of the next social gathering.

Sugar Cookie Bars 

Ingredients:

1 cup margarine

1 1/2 cups white sugar

3 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

3 1/2 cups flour

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350°F.  Place parchment paper in the bottom of a 9x13" cake pan and PAM the sides of the pan.

Beat the margarine and sugar until creamy.   Add eggs and vanilla and mix well (for a minute or so).  In a separate bowl mix together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt.  Add dry ingredients to wet and beat together.  

Transfer the dough to the cake pan.

With your hands or a stiff spatula press the dough down flat to cover the entire bottom of the pan.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the top of the cookie is a very light brown.  

Let pan cool for 5 minutes, then transfer the cookie slab to a cookie sheet to cool completely (if you used parchment paper on the bottom of the pan, it will pop out of the pan easily).  To ice, make up a batch of your favourite vanilla butter cream frosting and apply it to the cookie slab with a spatula (I adore the icing from the Primrose Bakery cookbook).  Add sprinkles on top, and then cut the cookie into bars with a sharp knife.  

And you're done! The only person that won't thank you for these delicious bars is your waistline.