Just beautiful! A wonderful success!
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So nice to go pick your own rhubarb. Its a rhubarb strawberry pie. Just a mixture of rhubarb , strawberries, sugar, half a lemon juice, lemon zest and 1/4 cup flour for thickening. The pie dough is all butter pie dough from Baking with Dorie. Will be served tomorrow.
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An enviable lattice !
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Beautiful pie, Stef_bakes, Happy Mother’s Day!
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Thank you
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Thank you and a Happy Mothers Day to you too.
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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!
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Great idea about using the crockpot.
Do you think Brioche bread would have been better?
I’m sure you’re beyond exhausted, don’t know how you had that much energy!
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There’s a saying something to the effect of “that we are our own harshest critics”, you had an amazing success and the food looked wonderful and I’m sure enjoyed by all. Sometimes we all look back and think “should have” but we overlook the fact that everyone else had a wonderful experience, kudos to you for all your effort and the lovely food.
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Congratulations on what sounds like a success! Thanks for sharing all the planning and details here. It’s been fun to follow along.
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Echoing LLM, it was super fun to follow along. Sorry about your FP. Fabulous write-up of learnings and good for you to do that while it’s all fresh in your mind. I bet the attendees will be talking about this party for a long time - you may have yourself a lifetime gig!!
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It’s been fun reading along, and the recipients of this lovely tea will remember it for a good while, I’m sure!
Good luck finding those frozen scones. You know when you DO find them, theyll be right where you told yourself you wouldn’t forget where you put them…right? 
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I baked honey-butter-almond-coconut pastries for my sister as a Mother’s Day present for her to thank her for taking great care of me since I returned to the US.
This week has been hard for her for a few reasons.
① May 8th was the 37th anniversary of our father’s death. As is tradition, we lit a yahrzeit candle at sundown the night before.
② May 10th was our mother’s birthday. My mother and my sister lived together for many, many years until our mother died in 2009.
③ My nephew, who lives in Texas, and my sister don’t have a good relationship. That understandably pains my sister.
I still don’t have a job and my sister buys me what I need including paying for a doctor’s visit and prescriptions. In return I take care of all housework and her cat, Coco. Though my relationship with my sister is thankfully improving, BOTH of us could do much better. There are still umpteen things I want to and need to do for her, but there are issues she isn’t able to deal with. However SOME progress is SLOWLY being made there.
I bought my sister a nice Mother’s Day card especially for sisters…something I was surprised to find. And rather than buy a gift for her, I figured this would be better as I know she loves both almond paste/marzipan and coconut, so I liberally filled the store-bought honey butter pastry dough with those two things. I hope she likes these (I tried one and it tasted good) and the card. I do wish they looked better, but I did the best I could with with the equipment I had.
And I hope she and all the mothers and children here on Hungry Onion have a wonderful Mother’s Day.
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Made it. It was too chocolate-y! The recipe reminded me of the Mrs. Fields chocolate cake that I love, but the Wellesley cake was over the top with chocolate. No picture.
I remember having these biscuits in Italy a long long time ago like 2005. Never forget what I ate. This recipe is from Torta della Nonna and the biscuits are called Ciambelline al Vino(red wine biscuits). 5 ingredients flour, sugar,baking soda, olive oil and wine. They are usually dunked in wine or coffee. Recipe says to mix by hand and it was difficult to mix, next time i will use a stand mixer. Right now they are crunchy with a soft interior. Its a wonderful baking book and best of all a hardcover was on special for $10.
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They look like taralli!
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On checking both recipes, the taralli have white wine and are not dipped into sugar like the ones i baked but otherwise same ingredients.
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I feel extremely NOT like baking 
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Neighbor #2 is feeling a lot better and asked for some whole wheat bread. I wanted to give her a fairly bland bread without any extra chemicals or preservatives, so I made up a loaf. This was my first attempt at “braiding” bread. I thought this might work better as she can easily tear off a piece at a time and munch on it.
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You are so thoughtful and very generous. Your neighbor is so very lucky to have you so close! 
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