Time for Tea....The Petersham

Hello there, I hope you are keeping well.

I think this post should be renamed to "Look who came to afternoon tea!"....but keeping with tradition I went with the hotel name instead! Last weekend I met up with the wonderful Secret Tea Society ladies for our Christmas afternoon tea at The Petersham hotel in Richmond.

Now the lovely Claire organised this tea for us and she certainly delivered a wonderful afternoon! We had a poetry reading, lots of lovely gifts, a good natter......and look who else made an appearance....

Father Christmas popped by during afternoon tea!

Now if you've ever read my craft blog you'll know that I am a big kid at heart and I love Christmas time! I love everything about it, so the fact that it snowed and Santa popped along really made this afternoon tea special!

Once we were all seated and had picked our teas from the menu, our afternoon tea stand was brought out.....

The festive cake stand

We had finger sandwiches, warm scones and a lovely selection of festive cakes to pick from as we nattered away!

There was a nice selection of teas on offer, including traditional English, Earl Grey, Assam, Darjeeling and a Christmas Blend. I of course opted for the Christmas blend which was a rich black tea full of spicy Christmas flavours - really scrummy!

Traditional afternoon tea sandwiches

 The sandwiches were cut into traditional fingers and were all very fresh and scrummy. There was a good selection of fillings too, including turkey and cranberry sauce, smoked applewood cheese with apple cider chutney, salmon and cream cheese and cucumber.

Next we moved to the top tier of the stand to the scones which were cranberry and lemon. The scones were light and flavoursome. My one comment is that they were served warm, but weren't wrapped in a napkin to keep the warmth....by the time we got to them they had gone cold again. The scones were served with a pot of clotted cream and we each had our own pot of jam....so no arguing over jam!

Finally we got to the sweet selection and if I am honest this is where I felt the tea was let down a bit. There was a lot of choice on the plate - all very festive.....but I didn't think the presentation was that appealing and to be honest I was a little disappointed with the quality of the sweet items I tried.

The pastries on offer included a yule log roulade, Christmas spice financiers, red fruit and pistachio choux buns, linzer biscuits, gingerbread macaroons and traditional stolen - a lovely selection.

But the Stollen I had was unfortunately rather dry and the financier was a little claggy (although the flavour was wonderful). I was reliably told that the Yule log roulade was wonderful though.

This festive tea cost £25.00 each, if you want a glass of bubbles you need to add another £12.50. The price was reasonable, although we weren't offered any seconds. Saying that we didn't all finish the cakes we had and the hotel happily boxed up the extra items for us to take home.

All in all I had a wonderful afternoon is beautiful settings. The Secret Tea Society is a lovely group to belong to, if you are interested in joining us please take a peek at the website!

Thanks for popping by today, we hope to see you again very soon for some more afternoon tea adventures!

Rachel