Have you ever smelled a Star Anise?

If you haven't I strongly encourage you to do so. Star Anise was one of the ingredients used in the recipe I tried for chai and apparently comes from evergreen trees that grow in China and Japan. (We have an abundance of evergreen trees here in Newfoundland! I demand we have Star Anise seed pods in some of ours! ) Star Anise most certainly has the scent that I get whenever I drink a cup of chai latte and it has a licorice scent to it as well. The look of Star Anise reminds me of the starburst beads that I used many moons ago. The chai recipe itself turned out okay but it's just not as 'spicy' as the prepackaged mixture that I've been buying at the grocery store. I've read some of the reviews and many of them suggest that ginger is missing from the mixture. I'm not quite sure what it is but I will have to experiment with the ingredients a bit if I want to get a taste similar to the Tazo mixture.

According to this website that sells the Tazo mixture, the ingredients include: water, black tea, black pepper, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, star anise, cane sugar, honey, ginger juice, vanilla extract and citric acid. I used two actual chai tea bags for my chai latte experiment and I doubled all the ingredients called for in this recipe. There's my chai latte in my Vitamix. The Vitamix spins the ingredients to the perfect easy-to-drink temperature and gives it lots of foamy goodness to top it all off.