Thanks for all the encouragement in this tea journey! Especially to @Nannybakes who gave me a ton of advice.
Final menu:
King Arthur Cream Tea Scones with dried blueberries and lemon oil
King Arthur cream cheese apricot scones with candied ginger
Served with homemade jams and Irish butter
Carrot ginger soup (the surprise hit of the party, excellent with a small dollop of sour cream)
Roast beef finger sandwiches, cucumber cream cheese finger sandwiches (I used commercial white bread and it dried out in the 60 min between making the sandwiches and serving them. A COLOSSAL disappointment)
Rhubarb lemon buttermilk cakelets with Stella Parks’ fruity stabilized whipped cream (strawberry)
Victoria sponge with homemade jam
35 people attended, with 4 of them (an entire family) needing to eat strictly gluten-free, so they brought literally all their own food.
A couple lessons learned:
Scones
- Cream scones are very easy and quite good. (No butter, just heavy cream.)
- Freezing unbaked scones is amazingly effective.
- Somewhere in my house are 24 frozen scones that I intended to serve today. I WILL find them.
- I decided to bake the frozen scones at the venue, which breaks my cardinal rule of never baking for other people in an unfamiliar oven. Not surprisingly, I almost burned the bottom of that batch. The oven ran cold, and the tops were not getting golden, but the bottoms got very dark.
Finger Sandwiches
- Was furious with the bread drying out. It’s an enormous effort to make these things and cut the crusts off and all that folderol, and I wound up throwing quite a few of them away afterward because the bread just wasn’t good.
- I BROKE MY FAIRLY NEW CUISINART FOOD PROCESSOR this morning trying to whip the cold cream cheese. We’re talking a fairly expensive kitchen appliance, under 4 years old, just flat out dying. Ouch.
Carrot and ginger soup
This probably got more comments than anything else I served, maybe because it was unexpected. I fought with mom over the soup thing, but she insisted, and who am I to say no.
It’s a really, really straightforward recipe, and I even used packaged vegetable stock, something I never ever agree to do. And it was still good. I had a stereotypical conversation with one of the ladies after the meal in which she asked me to show her a photo of what fresh ginger looked like, because she had no idea. “Interesting,” she said.
Unrelated: I almost forgot to heat up the soup once I finally made it (late!) to the venue today, so I had to put it over a VERY hot flame in a huge industrial pot to try to get it ready in time. We then kept it warm in a crockpot and everyone served themselves.
Stella Parks’ freeze-dried fruit whipped cream method
Fortunately I made this BEFORE I broke my damn Cuisinart. It’s easy, tasty, and the method works.
Victoria Sponge
In general, these are just bland. I think it’s the kind of thing one gets nostalgic about if one grew up with it, but for me, it’s a nothing burger. There was a LOT of this left over, because there was so much carbohydrate that preceded it, folks were just tapped out. I’m glad I only made 5, not 6. At four eggs each, it’s a pricey cake to be so unimpressive.
Rhubarb lemon buttermilk cakelets
The fruit in this recipe makes the cake unpleasantly wet after a day or two, but before that happens, this cake is amazing. I cut the rhubarb VERY small for these in an attempt to mitigate the wetness.
Prep method
Obviously I wanted to make ahead as much as possible, but I also wanted everything to be delicious and fresh, so I tested all the make-aheading in advance to make sure it passed muster.
I made and froze the soup ahead of time, along with the mysteriously-missing blueberry scones. I should’ve frozen the apricot scones too, but I made them the day before, along with the sponge and the rhubarb cakelets.
All in all, I am satisfied with what I produced, with a few notable caveats. I’ll be eating carrot soup for a few days, but I’m not complaining at all!
