Homemade gifts are on my to-do list for Christmas every year which looks somewhat like this:
To do before Christmas:
- Planning the menu and shopping (gluten-free, aunt Rita!)
- Putting away the pumpkins, looking for stars
- Finding meaningful and makeable (!!!) ideas for self-made gifts
- Starting to give presents
You see, I'm speaking of painful experience. Up to now my DIY gifts were often senseless (crocheted animals, lyrically questionable poems) or not to finished (in one year I wanted to file soapstone lucky charms and completely lost track of time - it takes forever). But this year everything will be different! How do I know that? Well, everything is already corked and bottled. Because this year will be the year of chai syrup.
Advantages of chai-syrup:
- Even larger quantities can be cooked quickly and easily
- It is very Christmas like thanks to cinnamon and cloves, but still tastes good in January and February (unlike xmas cookies)
- It is versatile and very very very yummy. So always take a bottle for yourself!!
Honestly, until recently I didn't know how much I missed chai syrup in my kitchen. I love it as a chai latte with frothed milk, over pudding, breakfast porridge, crème caramel and vanilla ice cream. If it goes on like this, I'll have to cook another one in the new year! But now to the recipe.
That is what you'll need:
- 400 ml black tea
- 200 g agave syrup
- ½ Cinnamon stick
- 5 peppercorns, black
- ½ TL Cloves
- 1 pinch of cardamom
- 1 pinch of star anise
- 2-3 cm ginger
- sterile glass to fill the syrup in
These are the ingredients for a small bottle of chai syrup. Just calculate the ingredients according to the desired output. If you want to make it even easier, simply use ready-made chai tea as a base and reduce the spices that are added to it to cinnamon and pepper.
It's so easy to do:
- roast spices (without ginger) without oil in a coated pan to develop their flavour
- put the tea together with the spices and the ginger in a pot, let it simmer for 20 minutes
- strain the spice stock through a funnel and sieve and reboil it again with the agave syrup. Simmer until the liquid has thickened and a syrup is formed
- pour the syrup in the prepared bottle when it is still hot
How long does the chai-syrup last?
If you have sterilized the bottles well beforehand with boiling water and fill the syrup in when it is still hot, the syrup will last at least three months. So you can start producing the presents early enough to avoid stress!