AFTERNOON TEA

With all the Queen's Jubilee celebrations for being on the throne for 70 years there has been much talk of street parties and afternoon teas.  In fact in our part of France friends held their own afternoon tea party to celebrate but unfortunately I was unable to attend.  I'm back home in the UK because my father is in hospital and his future care is again under debate.  

So instead I decided it was time I posted about the afternoon tea I held for a friend's birthday just a couple of months ago.  That was in France too.

I used my three tier glass cake stand which I acquired at a brocante a couple of years ago for just 2€.  It matches some dessert plates and a regular one tier cake stand that were also collected for next to nothing from brocantes over the years.  My best white tablecloth doesn't come out very often but with that and real cups and saucers the table looked the business, even if I say so myself! 

The bottom layer was a selection of sandwiches with the crusts cut off (of course!).  There were home made egg mayonnaise and rocket on brown bread, smoked salmon, cream cheese and cucumber on brown and smoked ham with tomato and cucumber on white.

You can see the recipe for egg mayonnaise here.  I have never seen cress for sale in France so opted for rocket instead.  It was a good substitute.

Being in France, the sliced bread available is not quite like in the UK.  Generally the texture is nice but it always seems to me to be slightly sweet.  We toyed with the idea of making our own bread but as it was only a few days after we had arrived and we were still dealing with all the usual problems of being away from the house for so long decided it was a step too far.

The middle layer was Victoria scones.  For such an important occasion I didn't trust myself to make ordinary scones, my success with those being variable.  The Victoria scones are easy to make from the Be-Ro book recipe and for me they work every time.  They looked cute on the stand although someone who saw the pictures on Facebook said they looked like fat rascals!  

I can't say I've ever eaten a fat rascal so wouldn't know but they sound like fun so will add them to my ever lengthening bucket list of thing to bake!  You can see the recipe for Victoria scones here or look it up in the Be-Ro book - it's in all the recent editions.

The top layer, the crowning glory, was of small cakes.  The raspberry sponges were cut from a traybake recipe for a jam and coconut sponge, otherwise known as "school cake" and which I have been hankering after making for some time!  I used a recipe on the Asda website which you can see here.  It is very quick and easy and the little squares looked very pretty when topped with fresh raspberries.  You can also see the recipe here.

The little chocolate cakes were to a recipe from one of the collection of slim volumes that Delia Smith put out many years ago called "Baking".  They are chocolate, prune and Armagnac mini muffins and I topped them with an excellent chocolate icing from Lynn Hill's website Traditional Home Baking.  You can see the icing recipe here and I added a few decorations including halved glacé cherries, halved chocolate covered raisins and choclate vermicelli.  They were delicious!

No afternoon tea would be complete without an actual slice of cake so for that I made a lemon layer cake filled with lemon curd to another Delia recipe from the same book.  You can see that here.  I didn't make my own lemon curd but used a Bon Maman jar which I brought over from the UK.  Bizarrely you can buy lemon curd in France but not the Bon Maman one!

I had never made this cake before but had eaten it several times as it's a family favourite of Nick's sisters.  It was easy to make and, of course, yummy!

Our birthday guests enjoyed the afternoon tea and so did we.  Being Americans they had only ever had afternoon tea a couple of times before when in London.  It was fun to make and fun to eat.  It does involve a lot of preparation and baking with all the different elements but it's well worth the effort.

You can see my lemon curd layer cake here.

The prune and chocolate mini muffins are here.

The little raspberry cakes are here.

The egg mayonnaise recipe is here.

PILCHARDS ON TOAST, NEW CAKE STANDS AND SOME SAD NEWS

Now I know this may be an odd thing to post about but bear with me.

The recipe, if you can call it that, popped up in my FB feed and I was instantly compelled to make it for lunch!  We had it that day.

I was brought up on pilchards.  Not sardines*, but tinned pilchards in tomato sauce, warmed in a saucepan or in the oven and served on thick slices of toasted wholemeal bread.  Proper Hovis bread that had that delicious and unique aroma that Hovis doesn't have any more.

We usually keep in stock those very small tins of Glenryck pilchards in tomato sauce and at around 50p a tin they are just the right size for lunch for two.  The tins usually contain two plump pilchards that when split open and served with hard boiled egg make one of our favourite salads.

However, this particular recipe is a bit more sophisticated than just pilchards on toast!  It includes crushed avocado and rocket.  So, late to the party as usual, I have finally discovered that crushed avocados can be quite nice - how exciting that you can do more with an avocado than just serve it in wedges in a salad or prawn cocktail!

On the day I spotted the recipe I happened to have both a packet of ready washed rocket and two avocados in the house.  We also had a home made wholemeal loaf that Nick had made the day before.  You can see the toast recipe here, although it is actually for sardines and includes a sprinkling of chilli seeds which I omitted.

Ingredients

2 slices wholemeal bread

1 avocado

1 155g tin Glenryck pilchards in tomato sauce

a handful of rocket.

Method

Empty the can of sardines carefully into a dish or plate and split them into two along the back and open out.  If like me you are not partial to the larger bones remove the spines.  Transfer carefully to a small saucepan so that they don't break up into pieces and heat gently.

While the sardines are warming through toast the bread.  Halve the avocado and remove the stone then the flesh with a dessert spoon.  Put the flesh into a small bowl and mash with a fork.

Spread the mashed avocado on the toast, top with the rocket then the sardines and serve warm straight away.

Serves 2.

*A sardine is a small pilchard.  In other words, pilchards are bigger and plumper than sardines.

Now for the cake stands.  I had a couple of Ebay successes recently and added to my collection.  This one is a Clarice Cliffe creation by Wedgwood and I was thrilled when it arrived.  I was not so lucky with the next one.

I often see cabbage leaf pottery on sale at French brocantes (a brocante is like a flea market) and it is usually quite pricey.  Most of it is also quite hideous.  I spotted this cake stand on Ebay just after I had already bid on the Clarice Cliffe one and it also came with two fairly large plates.  I was not fussed about having the plates but coveted the cake stand.  I turned out to be the only bidder and got the lot for £15.

Unfortunately the seller made the double error of not wrapping it very well and sending it via Hermes.  Over the last few years we've been doing a dog walk that begins at a small car park on the edge of town.  It's used by Hermes to decant parcels from their huge lorry to the cars and vans that deliver them to people's homes.  I have seen the way the parcels are handled and personally I would never use them to send anything even vaguely fragile or more valuable than a cheese sandwich. 

The seller has refunded my money and the three items are now in the bin.  Such a shame.  It will be a long time before I ever see another one like it I expect.

Lastly, the sad news as mentioned in the title is that the cake stall that we held at my place of work every year is no longer going to take place.  Not just this year (for obvious reasons) but not ever.  The owners of the business have decided that the Children in Need charity is already cash rich and any funds should be raised a different way and given to a different charity. 

 

So, no more huge baking sessions to supply the cakes.  

The first time we did it in 2003 we raised £130.  Last year we raised £2,113 and the grand total over the years is well over £15,000.  That's an awful lot of cake and I shall miss doing it.  It's what renewed my interest in baking and extended my repertoire beyond the annual Christmas cake and the occasional birthday chocolate cake.

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I have done a bit of research and discovered that the "lettuce leaf" plates and cake stand are quite sought after and can be obtained elsewhere for quite large sums of money.  The design is actually "geranium leaves" and now I look at the pictures they do look like geranium leaves.  I can get a cake stand for £52 and the plates for £35 each.  What a shame that the seller did not pack them more carefully.