Tea @ Home

My friends and I are now getting together monthly for tea. In May, we celebrated my birthday with tea at the Ritz. In June, Regina was supposed to host but she was too busy (poo poo her!). In July, we celebrated Lotty’s birthday at Lovejoy’s and this month it was time to celebrate Vienna’s birthday at my house (we are out of birthdays for September!).
Our experience at Lovejoy was so positive that I modeled my menu after their own. Of course, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to replicate those incredible fluffy scones, so I decided to make a ginger scone recipe that has been getting raves in the Craigslist food forum. They were very, very good, even though I overbaked them a little bit. I served them with European-style butter, clotted cream (available at Joaquin Deli), orange marmalade, raspberry jam, lemon curd and dulce de leche. The dulce de leche was by far the most popular toping (ha!). I was glad that I got to use the little bowls that I bought at the Japanese restaurant again.
I also served three types of tea sandwiches: cream cheese & cucumber, chicken salad and Stilton and apple – all inspired by the offerings at Lovejoy’s. The cucumber sandwiches were the least popular, apparently traditional cucumber sandwiches have cucumber and butter, not cream cheese. Next time. The chicken salad ones were great and the Silton worked very well with the thin apple slices. I’d originally meant to make them with pear, but the pears available at Safeway are just not very tasty this time of year. I used white sandwich bread to make them and cut the crusts myself, which made them look not very neat. Unfortunately, Safeway no longer stocks Ironkids Crustless Bread, which I LOVE. Does anyone know a source?
Finally, I got a tripple-mousse cake from Safeway, which was delicious.
Lotty brought crumpets, but we never got around to them.
The teas were Akbar Yellow Gold and an Orange Pekoe Tea that I got at the 99-cents store. Both are from Sri Lanka, and both were delicious. I suspect I drank too much, as Camila had a pretty restless night.
In all, we had a great time. The tea started at 3pm and went on until 8pm. It won’t be my turn to host again for several months but I’m looking forward to the next time.