Event #4: Our First New Year’s Tea (Admission: We didn’t bake the bread ourselves…)

Menu
January 1, 2017

Sandwiches
Cucumber, Cream Cheese, and Mint
Cheddar and Prosciutto
Salmon, Cream Cheese, and Dill
Goat Cheese, Pear, Walnut, and Honey

Desserts
Victorian Sponge Cake
Chocolate Ganache Macarons
Raspberry Jam Macarons
Rosemary and Thyme Shortbread
Fruit Salad
Scones with Raspberry Jam and Clotted Cream

Beverages
Lavender Limeade
Jasmine Tea
Oolong Tea
Guava Tea

And while I'm home for a mere month, why stop at one event, right? 

We figured that everyone would have New Year's day off, so we decided to host a tea. Whether people would want to come to a tea after a late night of potentially drunken reveling, we weren't sure, but we thought we would start out the new year the way we wanted to (eating a ton of baked goods) so maybe other people may want to as well. 

No courses, less stress, we thought. Wrong, we were. No courses actually meant everything needed to be done at the same time. And since it wasn't a dinner, we were having our tea at 2PM so a lot less cooking time. Things we probably should have factored into but did not. No, no, no...we (meaning "I") was mostly just excited for all the baked items that would be on the menu. All my years of drinking tea and eating tiny sandwiches would really pay off here! 

Our menu structure was very different - we thought about all the little sandwiches that we (I) had always liked best at tea houses: cucumber, cream cheese, and mint; cheddar and prosciutto; salmon, cream cheese, and dill; and goat cheese, walnut, and honey. And, as noted in the title of this post, we were not yet at the level of making our own bread every time so we thought we were super fancy in buying artisan rosemary bread for all the sandwiches. 

Then came the desserts. One of the first things we decided on were macarons, which John really wanted to make, and I was very happy to not make. I had always heard these were the most difficult dessert to master so I would be thrilled not to work with something so finicky with everything else on the menu. He wanted to make two types - chocolate and vanilla with a raspberry jam. I felt like we needed to have scones, because what tea would be complete without scones - which would be served with clotted cream and raspberry jam. To round things out a bit, we would have fruit salad, a rosemary and thyme shortbread, and my showstopper was to be the Victorian Sponge Cake (sandwiched inside with cream and - what else - raspberry jam). 

Have you noticed that we tried to make our prep more efficient by having a similar base for some of the sandwiches and...well, lots of things with raspberry jam? 

Well, to no avail haha. We were still scrambling for time with all of the sandwiches being completed within the last 45 minutes of guests showing up and that was definitely the first thing we ran out of. 

But the tea event was amazing! It was so nice to sit down with our guests, something we had not yet experienced with our other dinners because we were always preparing a next course or clearing dishes. Here, everything had to be done on time and we actually got to sit, and laugh, and try things while everyone else did. We got to talk about the holidays and what the new year would be bringing - 2017! And, because all the dishes had to be completed and on the table either as before guests got there or as guests were arriving, we managed to take more pictures of the food than we had previously managed. Pictures, well, over the years we learned we can never have enough because we always want a slightly different angle or something is blurry or the lighting is off. But, this was our first event besides our first dinner were we managed to get pictures of everything, which would not happen again for some time after.