Coffee Loving Papercrafters

Hello there coffee loving crafty peeps!  It’s Kerry here and I’m back with another fun Sunday Sip!  Today I’m sharing a card AND a REVIEW!  You see, I follow a fellow “The Weird Explorer” on Youtube who travels the world in search of unique and interesting fruits.  Last week, he shared a taste test and review of two different types of tea derived from coffee…The berries (also called cherries) and the leaves).  His review left me intrigued and I had to search for some of these dried fruits to taste for myself!  I headed over to Amazon and found some on Prime so I ordered a bag and it arrived in just a few days!  I’ll get back to the review at the end of my post…but right now, let’s get on with the card!

So after taste testing this cascara tea, I was inspired to create this card, with the color, and the flavors of the tea still in my mind.  I pulled the fun stamp set from Uniquely Creative stamp set I purchased last year at the Scrapbook Expo near me (it would have been this weekend had it not been for the problems we are having with COVID).  Uniquely Creative is an Australian stamp company that manufactures stamps in the USA.  I was lucky to discover them last year and was looking forward to visiting their booth again this year.  Anyway, this set doesn’t appear to be available anymore so WAAHHH….So sorry!

So I stamped the cups and the glass (to create the hot and Iced versions of the tea) and colored them with copics to match the color of the tea as well as the fun plaid paper from Lawn Fawn.  I stamped the sentiment (from a Hero Arts My Monthly Hero kit HERE) and then attached the cups.  I then stamped the little hearts and polka-dots in the Uniquely Creative set onto the page.

After finishing this panel, I attached the plaid paper (machine stitched along the edges to finish it off) to a yellow piece of cardstock, wrapped some blue ribbon around the panel and then attached the cup square.  I then mounted the whole thing onto a white card base.

Now let’s get on to the taste test!

So after watching the Weird Explorer’s review, I ordered the cascara berries on Amazon and waited for them to arrive.  After a few days they arrived and I got started on the test.  I started off by testing the dried fruit by popping one berry in my mouth.  It was very much like dried cranberries in texture- just a little more dry and dehydrated. They tasted a little fruity and had a nice floral/fruit aroma…and reminded me of something familiar but I couldn’t pinpoint the exact source.  They were easy to chew and had significant flavor-although they were like chewing on a piece of meat that didn’t break down very easily. I could tell by what continued to remain in my mouth that there was a ton of fiber in these little berries.  I heated up one cup of warm water and then placed two tablespoons of berries into the single serve French Press below and waited for it to steep to my preferred tea color liking (which was about 10 minutes).  I poured this tea into my cup and savored the flavor.  It was lightly sweet and still had that familiar flavor. I didn’t add any sugar as I wanted to test the true flavor of this tea.

After trying it warm, I watched another video to learn more about the berries and learn how to make it another way.  This video was quite interesting and informative.  I also learned that the coffee berry is 625 times more rich in antioxidants than blueberries and has 1/4 of the caffeine content of coffee.  WOW!  I decided to test it out on ice and really explore the flavor before adding additional spices.  I wanted to pin down that familiar flavor too…and I DID!!!  It tasted very much like PRUNES.  I love Sunkist prunes (the are sweet treats for me) so I was thrilled to pinpoint that flavor.  It must be the drying/dehydrating of the fruit that matched that flavor so well.  Pretty interesting!!!  I’m not sure if it tastes the same to everyone, but I really recognized that flavor.  A mildly sweet and identifiable prune fruit flavor.  It is quite delicious in my opinion.

So if you’re interested in tasting this tea, I recommend it!!  Give it a try and let me know what you think!  I’ll leave you with another informative video to help get you in the cascara groove:  What is Cascara?