Time for Tea......With Lorna & Rachel!

Hello there!

On Sunday Lorna and I hosted our own afternoon tea in honour of our friend's Birthday. We throw tea parties for our friends a couple of times a year....baking our own goodies and serving everything on vintage china from Lorna's fab collection.

We keep it simple and avoid menus...but we always set the table properly and we always use china....each one of us having a different pretty tea cup. Sometimes we theme our teas (Halloween is a popular afternoon tea), but other times....like this one....we have a more traditional affair.

 

Lorna and I have very set roles in our afternoon teas....Lorna makes amazing scones and is rather nifty with the sandwiches, while I provide any other sweet treats whether that be in the form of cakes or biscuits...or anything else that takes our fancy. Of course we do swap roles...Lorna makes some mean meringue kisses and I can whip up a batch of mini quiches when I fancy it!

 

On this occasion we had ten people enjoying tea (including ourselves), and so we had two tables full of sweet cakes and sandwiches....

 

 

Our sandwich fillings included egg mayonnaise (Anika the Birthday girl is rather obsessed with egg mayo!), ham, cucumber and cheese - all crustless of course! We had a mixed group joining us for tea on Sunday...ranging from the young to the slightly older and so we decided to keep the sandwich choice quite conservative on this occasion. On other occasions we've featured open sandwiches with chorizo and tomato or coronation chicken, whatever takes our fancy really! Although we do always make egg mayonnaise and cucumber as these are both very popular in our group of friends!

 

By request of Sheree I also made some mini quiche Lorraines....always a popular addition to the afternoon tea table and so simple to make.

 

Lorna made her wonderfully scrummy scones, a selection of plain and fruit. These were served with cream and homemade jam (yes we discussed the great scone debate again!). Mum provided a jar of her scrummy strawberry jam and I had a jar of freshly made blackberry jam.

 

 

For the sweet treats we had a vanilla cupcakes topped with buttercream icing and blackberries, lemon cupcakes topped with blueberries and scrummy black forest cupcakes topped with a dollop of cream (I got a bit carried away with the cupcakes!!). I also made some Viennese fingers, dipped in dark chocolate. Mum also baked for us...bringing along chocolate tray bake and the cutest shortbread topped with fresh cream and summer berries. It really was a feast of sweet treats and we were all spoilt for choice!

 

 

I also made one other sweet treat for this tea that I haven't attempted before.....but I was so pleased that I did as it was a really simple, but popular addition to the table.....

 

 

I made pink lemonade!

 

I found the wonderful vintage glass R.Whites bottle in a local antique shop and it looked brilliant with the pretty pink liquid in. I served my lemonade in mini milk bottles with super cute striped straws! The lemonade was a hit with everyone who tried it...I will definitely be making it again!

 

This of course was all washed down with copious amounts of tea! We enjoyed pots of traditional breakfast tea, ceylon tea and green tea.

 

Thank you for popping by today - we hope you've enjoyed our own afternoon tea blog post...pop back later this week for a behind the scenes blog post and some recipes!

 

If  you've popped by today please leave us a comment to let us know you've popped by!

 

Rachel & Lorna