Any Legend of Zelda fans here? My brother has fallen in love Breath of the Wild and other Zelda games and he might have gotten me hooked on them too. So when we saw Aimee’s Unofficial Legend of Zelda Cookbook kickstarter, we immediately backed it.

As we wait for the book to come (So. Many. Bonuses!!), Aimee has been releasing recipes for backers to try. When I saw a recipe for milk tea, I knew that I had to make it.

This recipe is pretty unique because while I have heard of steeping the tea directly in the milk (helps to flavour the milk for panna cotta if you want to make a flavoured one), I haven’t heard of making milk tea with caramel. Obviously, I was very excited to try this because I haven’t really found a milk tea recipe to be my go-to.

My biggest hurdle in making this was (perhaps unsurprisingly), the caramel. I made the mistake of using a large pan and ended up burning the sugar the first time I made caramel. It took a bit of scrounging about, but I managed to get a smaller pan and everything turned out pretty well after that!

Once you have the caramel down, the recipe is pretty straightforward. For the plain milk tea, I chose to use the Rangoon Tea House’s black tea. It’s a robust tea so I was confident it could stand up to the milk and sugar, and it’s pretty fine so it brews very quickly.

The other tea I used was the masala chai tea from Rakura in Nepal. Why make one flavour when you can make two, right? It also turned out beautiful, the spices of the chai blending well with the milk and caramel. I think you could also experiment with other flavours, as long as they’re bold enough to stand up to sugar and milk.

I didn’t have jars, so I used teacups but this is what they look like:

The coin in the middle is a Zelda coin that we 3D printed the other day – the NLB has a lab where you can use the 3D machines for free so we decided to try it out!

(We also printed hint coins so I’m one step closer to living in a Professor Layton game)

Aimee has kindly given her permission to share the recipe for Chateau Romani and added a tip: for an autumn flavour, add a dash of cinnamon (I used chai tea so I skipped that)

Recipe: Chateau Romani from the Unofficial Legend of Zelda Cookbook

Ingredients

• 1 Tablespoon Water (1/2 ounce)
• 4 Tablespoons White Granulated Sugar
• 2 Cups milk or sweetened almond milk (16 oz)
• 2 teabags of simple black tea

Directions

1. Add water and sugar to sauce pan on medium to medium high heat. Monitor for 4 to 6 minutes as it melts, bubbles, then caramelizes. Do not stir, simply wait for the sugar to melt, and swivel the pan if absolutely necessary. Wait until it is brown, thick, and syrupy, and stay with it the whole time. If it begins to burn, take it off the heat immediately.
2. Add milk and tea bags directly to the sauce pan, stay on medium to medium high heat. Now you can stir to incorporate the caramelized sugar throughout. Do not boil, lower the heat if necessary to keep it just below boiling for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring the whole time. Boiling it can make the milk taste different, and can bitter the tea.
3. Serve immediately in heat safe Chateau Romani labeled milk jars and enjoy!

If you liked this recipe and want more, you can pre-order Aimee’s cookbook at this link (here’s the kickstarter page if you want to go through there). I’ve also tried making her monster loaf before (there’s a picture here) and it also turned out well. After these successes, I’m even more excited for this cookbook!

Featured Image: Photo by Me