Event #14: The New Year’s Tradition Continues

Menu
January 1, 2019

Savory
Spinach, Tomato, and Mozzarella Mini Quiches
Egg Stuffed Baked Bell Peppers
Crab Empanadas
Mini Chicken Pot Pies
Caesar Wedges

Sweet
Champagne Yule Log
Devonshire Scones with Clotted Cream
Fruit Salad
Creme Brulee Macarons
Waffle Macarons with Maple Bacon
Peach Cookies

Sip
Selection of Coffee Drinks
Selection of Fine Teas
Cara Cara Juice
Pomegranate Juice
Grapefruit Juice
Sparkling Wine

Sweet, Savory, Sip - it's another year in the AJRB household! 

To welcome 2019, we had some of our usual suspects in the Sweet category - scones and a berry salad - and almost the entire Sip category remained the same with a coffee, a variety of teas, and juices - to be used to make a mimosa or not. 

However, we tried to be more inventive on the other side of the house. For our Savory category, we (obviously) went with all new items. We thought it was kind of brunch time so we went with some egg based dishes - a caprese-based quiche and Egg-Stuffed Baked Peppers. This was a great idea in theory because neither were very complex to execute but the difficulty was these were only dishes best served hot. And the difference with tea is that we don't do courses, so we don't control when things are being served and when people will eat them. Therefore, as great as these dishes were, they weren't nearly as successful as they could have been. With the salad, we had a slight issue with ingredients - we couldn't find what we were originally looking for so we went with raddicchio which I will tell you right now, was the wrong substitution. It was way too bitter to eat, and it didn't help that we cut them too big so it was a lot of lettuce and not enough other stuff. Okay, so all that being said, we had two other absolute super stars on the menu - the Crab Empanadas and Mini Chicken Pot Pies. Both of these had made-from-scratch crusts that kept the fillings warm so they were still hot and delicious. They carried the Savory team for sure. 

On the Sweet side, John's macarons got even more interesting - we came up with flavors we hadn't typically seen in stores - Creme Brulee and Waffle with Maple Bacon. The Creme Brulee ones were beautiful, with shards of caramelized sugar around the edges. And my crowning achievement for the tea was a Champagne Yule Log. 

After watching Great British Bake off one too many times, I had gotten really excited about doing a Yule Log and achieving ~the perfect swirl~ which is of course, a lot harder said than done. After creating a sponge that was malleable enough to fold, I was getting ready to properly frost and roll it when, somehow, my little cake ended up on the floor. Yes, the floor. So at like midnight two days before the old year expired, I was remaking the cake I had just made so I could get a cake that had cooled and rolled in the right shape to properly frost. Not my finest moment. 

However, it did come out beautifully. I was so proud of how pretty that cake was. If only it had tasted as good as it looked. Honestly, I think it tasted how it was supposed to taste - I just didn't like the flavor, but I had chosen a Champagne Yule Log for the celebratory feel of it for New Years, especially as the decoration was covered in a white chocolate "bark" and with black and white beads placed strategically to create a polka dot pattern. 

It was odd to have the cake come out looking like I wanted it to, and knowing I did things right, but not taste how I wanted it to.

That being said, I was super proud - I had made something that looked complicated that I had seen on TV! Tea is always the time to have the baking shine, and it is always a great way to start out the year - by tackling a new pastry challenge that I would have never thought I may have been able to do the year before.