Are you an avid tea drinker looking for a different way to enjoy your tea this summer? A lot of tea drinkers go iced in the warm summer months, some even adding lemonade to their iced tea, but there is an even colder way to enjoy your tea in the summer months if you enjoy green tea: smoothies!

Below you will find the recipe for my personal summer tea concoction, which will require matcha (powdered green tea). Matcha is high in caffeine content compared to regular steeped tea, so you may not want to indulge in one of these smoothies too late in the day.

INGREDIENTS
1 tsp matcha (powdered green tea)
4 oz. cup of fruit-flavored yogurt (Light 'n Fit works well, low in sugar)
frozen strawberries (or other desired fruit)
frozen peach slices (or other desired fruit)
apple juice

A peach farmer in New Zealand has been growing a new variety of peaches for a couple of seasons now. Well, the variety is new to the English speaking world, I guess.

The flatto peach has been growing in China and across Asia for thousands of years. In fact it is supposedly one of the oldest varieties of the fruit. It has a flat bottom and flat top, so it's not round like to variety of peach that I'm used to. The flatto also is said to have a superior flavor and juiciness. That sounds great!

The grower, Kevin Paulin, says he's never had this much interest before. Apparently people have been been seeking him out to ask about his new crop. No word yet if this will reach American markets. The peaches have barely begun appearing in New Zealand stores. It's still pretty new outside of Asia, so it may take a while. Does anyone know about this variety of peach, and if it is available outside of China and New Zealand?

Personally, I like both the cake and the frosting when I have a cupcake because the two elements balance each other when eaten together. For others, the cupcake experience is all about the frosting, which they feel should be sweet, indulgent and in huge, billowy piles. They could take or leave the cake part. While the cake part of the cupcakes featured above is probably tasty, the thick frosting is one that should send thrills of joy through the hearts of frosting-lovers.

This is a Peach Cupcake with Martha Stewart's Mascarpone Frosting, made by the Cupcake Queen at 52 Cupcakes. The frosting is a combination of mascarpone, whipped cream and a little confectioners' sugar that is beaten at high speed until it is light as a cloud and richer than just about any other frosting you're likely to come across. With the peach cupcake, the frosting makes the dessert taste like peaches and cream, but it would work well on a chocolate or vanilla cake, too.

Rowena, of the blog Rubber Slippers in Italy, put together a simple dessert of roasted yellow peaches with Italian meringue topping that is a great way to end a summer meal. The dessert takes advantage of the flavorful peaches that are in season right now, roasting them to enhance their sweetness even further. Italian meringue is made when a sugar syrup is boiled and streamed into beaten egg whites. The heat of the syrup cooks the meringue and allows it to hold its shape much better than an uncooked meringue will, so it makes a prettier and more stable dessert. The dessert takes little time to prepare and is as beautiful to look at as it is delicious - a dish sure to impress guests, as well as satisfying your sweet tooth with a light treat.

This may very well be the epitome of a fruit dessert. It is a Peach and Blueberry Tart, made by Stef from Couteau Bonswai that uses a free-form crust to eliminate the fussiness of fitting dough into a tart pan and has a combination of fresh berries and peaches in the center that cook right along with the crust. No pre-baking and no pre-cooking necessary. An additional bonus is that, unlike store-bought fruit tarts that have a carefully glazed arrangement of sliced berries and fruits on top, the cooked filling means that this tart can be served hot from the oven with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, which is probably the only thing you can add to improve the dessert.

Stef used a recipe from Creampuffs in Venice for the easy-to-handle and delightfully flaky crust, so take a look there for instructions.

The interesting thing about LightFull Smoothies is that they're designed to be filling, while other smoothie drinks are usually designed to deliver a few servings of fruit, or a richer alternative to juice - not to fill you up. As a result, you can drink an ordinary smoothie, still be hungry, and oftentimes, worse off than before because of all the sugar. This is not likely to happen with LightFull. All of the smoothies are made with natural ingredients. They are sweetened with fruit purees and a tiny amount of sugar, as well as other natural sweeteners like erythritol, which is naturally found in grapes, pears, melons. Each smoothie has 6 grams of protein and 5 or 6 grams of fiber, which is at least 20% of your recommended daily intake. They also only have 90-100 calories each, and almost no fat (0-1g, depending on flavor), so you can indulge in each delicious flavor without any guilt - just the fact that you're doing something good for your body that happens to taste better than you expected.

Cafe Latte - Two thumbs up!

• Nicole: This was my favorite flavor. It had a very smooth, creamy coffee taste that was slightly sweet and had none of the bitterness that coffee-flavored drinks often have. I had to drink it slowly, though, because it was much more filling than any blended coffee drink I can remember.
• Sarah: Of the four flavors, I liked this one the most as well, but that might also be a personal bias toward all things coffee.

Both white and yellow peaches have their fans, but what is the difference between the two types of fruits? While they may look the same at first glance, the white-fleshed peaches are often lighter in color than the yellow ones. Their skin will tend more towards pink and less towards orange. White peaches are less acidic than yellow peaches, so their flavor is much softer and more delicate. They're excellent for eating out-of-hand, while yellow peaches tend to be better for baking, since their flavor can stand up to the flavors of buttery pie crusts, sugary cobblers and lots of vanilla ice cream. All ripe peaches are delicious, so there is no way to make a "wrong" choice when you're deciding between the two.

There are also white apricots and white nectarines and, by and large, the same general rules apply for other stone fruits as for peaches. And whether you choose to go for white or yellow stone fruits, the criteria for picking good ones are the same: they should have a strong, sweet scent and give slightly to the pressure of a finger.