Event #24: Starting 2021 with some Cute-Teas

Menu
January 1, 2021

Savory
Beet and Smoked Salmon Blinis
Scotch Eggs
Steak and Mushroom Vol au Vent

Sweet
Brown Sugar and Walnut Petit Fours
Mason Jar Tiramisu
Grapefruit Macarons
Cream Tea Scones

Sip
Selection of Fine Teas
Selection of Coffee Drinks
Fresh Orange Juice
Fresh Grapefruit Juice
Pence Vineyards Sparkling Wine

I think I'll stop starting off with safer-at-home updates, because now LA County has changed their order to indefinite so no need to continue to belabor the point; we can circle back around to this when it changes to anything other than the three of us.

Similarly, as there have been a lot of reflection posts about the end of a very long year, I won't add too much more dialogue to that space; I'll try to keep it relatively brief because it feels like it would be remiss to not say anything about the close of 2020. Throughout this year, I was constantly struck by my privilege to think about balancing my life - to try to make sure to balance my own mental and physical well-being with what I could offer the world in terms of my voice, my donations, or my support as a friend or family member. To remember that it was a marathon, not a sprint, so that I could continue to be engaged long-term is an important lesson that I continue to learn and am thankful for the support system John and I share as we continue to navigate into a new year.

Okay, onto the other stuff - the food stuff. New Year's Tea has been a fun tradition for us, and it has previously been the only event where we can sit down with our guests and enjoy food with them the whole time. On a similar note, it also can be the most stressful because we are trying to get everything done by a certain time, usually the middle of the day (we usually do our teas at between 12-2PM) so it is a lot of last minute scrambling.

Given the universal nature of this meal we are excited to share our course-by-course breakdown of how things went.

The Savory

The savory tend to be the most universally liked elements during tea, mostly because everyone is typically hungry (at least, I am), and even with our little tea, things were no different. We were excited to try out some recipes for this year and are excited to bring them back, potentially in different or updated versions in the future.

My favorite savory item was the beet and smoked salmon blinis, even if we opted to skip the caviar. We had seen these on the Great British Bake Off, Derry Girls Edition and I knew that I would want to make them. While they were not as quick as Prue said they would be, they were still relatively simple and dangerously easy to eat (I probably had 7 or so haha).

Scotch eggs - whew, we knew these would be heavy so we only made 4 eggs and we still had leftovers! They were delicious but very decadently filling, so I think I might have mustered half of one (I blame all the blinis).

Great British Bake Off (GBBO) was the inspiration for our last savory as well - vol-au-vents! They are basically puff pastry cups, filled with savory fillings, and man, they were tasty. We did a steak and mushroom filling but really, you could do whatever you wanted and I am sure we will be doing something like this again in the future.

The Sweet

There are a couple of things I get strongly in my head and it is hard for me to let go of them, and one such thing was that I really wanted to do petit fours for this tea. I felt I could actually do this, which is something I've been wanting to do, as well as practicing getting definition in those tiny cake molds - as the research I did indicated that petit fours are basically cake with pouring fondant (which I think is just a white chocolate drip - please correct me if I'm wrong though!) so I was excited to do both. Unfortunately, I think the cake recipe I picked was too sweet to pair with the white chocolate, though the Brown Sugar and Walnut Bundt cakes did come out of their molds much better than in the past!

Something I've been craving for months has been tiramisu, so we decided that to make it tea, we would just make it mini, since we have these mini mason jars. And if I had known how easy the cream was for tiramisu was, I would have made this for us months ago! Admittedly, my homemade lady fingers didn't come out quite as evenly as I would have wanted, but since I figured they would be hidden anyway, I wasn't too upset.

Macarons, in our house, are a John thing. Even though I am typically the baker, he is the one who wanted to master macarons. As yet one more kicker of 2020, though, out of the batch of close to 60 cookies, only 14 cookies were salvageable - meaning seven sandwiches. Why macarons are so fickle, I have no idea. Recently, I had made macarons too, and from one batch, almost all came out except for half a cookie sheet - which inexplicably decided to explode rather than lay flat - meaning they could not be used for sandwiches.

Lastly, our traditional cream scones...and truth be told, we didn't even touch them because we were so full, so they became breakfast the next day!

The Sip

Our sip menu remains pretty much the same year to year, and we really enjoy having fresh grapefruit and orange juice and we squeeze the day before to add to our mimosas during tea. This year, we both opted for grapefruit mimosas and finished our meal with coffee, as well as a cup of "Wedding" tea, a tea that John got for me right before we got married. It is a really subtle white tea, with vanilla and lemon flavor, which was a really nice way to end our big annual tea.