Afternoon tea Saturday 12 April 2014

As with all my afternoon teas, I wake up on the day excited at the prospect of meeting new guests and this one was no different. While all guests were coming in two’s, each couple hadn’t met any of the others. Someone was redeeming their Xmas present voucher while the others had all be on my waiting list for varying amounts of time. It had all the hall marks of an interesting afternoon and it lived up to the expectations. But what of the menu?

With Easter in the air, the sweeter aspects of this menu were put together with the season in mind.

There were Easter biscuits, light and crispy, flavoured with a bit of spice and lemon zest. I was interested to learn that these were a traditional British gift given to guests on Easter Sunday.

Instead of a classic Easter simnel cake, I decided on blueberry & marzipan muffins as a ‘take’ on this traditional treat with the combination of fruit and marzipan. The sharpness of the blueberries against the sweet, moist marzipan made these little indulgences extraordinarily good.

And Easter wouldn’t be Easter without chocolate so the pièce de resistance was a delectable, extremely fudgy and rich, chocolate gâteau

The savouries didn’t follow a seasonal theme but were nevertheless carefully chosen. The tuna, lemon, parsley and caper sandwich filling seemed to top the bill if the comments exuding from the table were anything to go by. The capers seemed to add that little something extra & special to it.

The warm savouries included sausage rolls made with my very own homemade puff pastry. There was also blinis topped with a feta & parsley pesto and garnished with slow roasted cherry tomatoes.

Guests lingered long into the late afternoon which was a compliment in itself reflecting how much they had enjoyed the whole experience. I was flattered to receive a spontaneous commendation yet again that “this was better than Betty’s”. Praise indeed!