This homemade black apple tea mix is a great gift to give the tea lover in your life. Apple tea is a favorite in our family. We find nothing is more perfect to sip on cold afternoons.

There is only one problem with this apple tea. The dried apples and cloves infuse the tea with so much flavor, once you try a cup, you might find you don’t want to give it away!

I do have a helpful hint for making this recipe. The recipe calls for drying 1 apple. That is all you need to make for the tea. However, my advice to you is to make several apples. Cuz what is going to happen is you will smell those apples as they dry. Your mouth will start to water. You won’t be able to resist sampling one, which will lead to two. Plus, you can’t keep a smell to yourself. No, the smell will permeate the home. Your family is going to ask what you are making. They will ask for their own sample, and soon your dried apple will be gone. So do yourself a favor. The food processor is already getting dirty with one apple. May as well slice 3 or 4. The oven already has to be on for 90 minutes, so may as well have 4 trays of apples drying. Really, what’s not to love about making both snack and a gift in one fell swoop?!?

Here’s how to make Black Apple Tea for a Homemade Holiday gift:

Black Apple Tea Recipe

1 sweet organic apple (I used honeycrisp, but you could use gala or fuji)
2 T lemon juice
2 t turbinado sugar
1/2 C loose leaf black tea
15 whole cloves
2 cinnamon sticks, broken (to break cinnamon sticks, place on towel and fold towel over. hit with heavy object several times)

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

Slice the apples as thin as possible. (I used the food processor) Soak the slices in a bowl of ice, water and the 2 T lemon juice for 5 minutes.

Drain slices and lay in one layer on a cookie sheet lined with either silpat or parchment paper. Bake in the preheated oven for 90 minutes.

Once dried and cooled, chop the apples finely. Mix the dried apples with the remaining ingredients. Store in an airtight container.

**To brew the tea, brew 1 tablespoon in one cup of hot water for 2 minutes.**

Stored properly, the tea will last 6 months. However, I doubt anyone can keep it around that long!

To package my tea, I used a Martinelli’s apple juice bottle. I loved that is was already apple shaped. I then added a green “leaf” that I cut out of a kleenex box that was green. On the backside of the leaf, I wrote the instructions for brewing the tea. This is the result:

Do you have any tea lovers in your life that would like Black Apple Tea Mix? If so, you’ll also want to check out all my apple tea recipes.

All month I am featuring recipes, crafts and projects for a Homemade Holiday. Be sure to subscribe to The Greenbacks Gal so you don’t miss a single one!