annieb123's Review of Kawaii Café Bubble Tea

by Stacey Kwong and Beyah del Mundo

Satisfy your bubble tea cravings at home (and affordably)! Kawaii Café Bubble Tea includes over 60 easy-to-follow recipes, beautifully illustrated in a fun anime style.

No matter if you call it boba or bubble tea, this addictive drink that originated in Taiwan in the 1980s has taken the world by storm, with shops popping up on every corner and lines out all their doors.

Kawaii Café Bubble Tea covers all the basics, from brewing tea and making your own tapioca balls (aka boba) to handcrafting sweeteners, syrups, toppings, and more with all-natural ingredients and no corn syrup. Each recipe includes exciting anime-style illustrations and instructions for customizing to your preferred level of sweetness.

Learn how to make:

Milk Teas (lactose-free Thai, black milk, and green milk teas)
Fruit Teas (strawberry, mango, watermelon, kiwi, pineapple, pomelo, and cucumber teas)
Specialty Drinks (with special ingredients including coconut milk, almond butter, taro root, and ice cream)

Recipes include:

Pomelo Slushie (green or black tea with Pomelo Jam and Simple Syrup)
Lady Bug (black tea with Strawberry Syrup and Watermelon Syrup)
Area 51 (green tea with Cucumber Syrup and Kiwi Syrup)
Mint Tea Lemon Mojito (mint tea with Lemon Syrup, Simple Syrup, and mint leaves)
Pink Panda (milk, Strawberry Syrup, and cookies-and-cream ice cream)

With yummy recipes, down-to-earth writing, and a delightful design, Kawaii Café Bubble Tea is the ultimate guide to this global phenomenon.

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

Kawaii Café Bubble Tea is an adorably cute, graphically appealing tutorial guide with recipes for bubble tea/boba with included recipes by Stacey Kwong & Beyah del Mundo. Content first published in 2020 as Boba , this graphic update and re-release was out 9th Jan 2024 from Quarto on their Rock Point imprint. It's 128 pages and is available in hardcover and ebook formats.
This book is a wonderful resource, especially for fans of bubble tea who find it difficult to source their daily drinks or are thinking about the cost over the long run. Plus it's so much fun to DIY!

It has a nice, easy to follow layout. The introductory chapter and how-to tutorial (~30% of the content) cover the basic hows and whys of the tools, ingredients, and toppings. The following chapters cover the standards: fruit teas, milk teas, and specialty drinks.

Each of the recipes includes an introductory description, ingredients listed in a bullet point sidebar (US measurements with metric/SI units in parentheses *yay*!), step by step instructions, as well a footers with tips and alternatives. The graphics are colorful and very cute (see book cover). The earlier edition had a number of photographs, but this edition has a complete graphic overhaul and the new aesthetic is pastel and kawaii with line drawn illustrations.

The recipe ingredients themselves are (mostly) easily sourced and will be available at well stocked grocery stores. There are a very few ingredients which might be a little more difficult to source, but definitely nothing that is 'way out there'.

All in all, -very- well written, beautifully presented drinks, made from tasty ingredients which are easily sourced and packaged into an adorably appealing format.

Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Reading updates

17 January, 2024: Started reading

17 January, 2024: Finished reading

17 January, 2024: Reviewed