Tea party details

For today's tea party wrap-up, let's begin with a few words about ... cupcake wrappers! I learned of these through the Paper Orchid stationery website but they were offered only in large quantities at the time. I fell in love with the teapot wrappers and eventually found some on eBay for about $12 a dozen, and I'm happy to see Paper Orchid now sells them in smaller quantities as well. They also have cake wrappers that work in a similar fashion, and I just *love* these elegant paper accessories. (I do wish I'd made my cupcakes taller, because I misjudged the height I needed, but the effect was still pretty good for a first-timer!)

Pink Lemonade Cupcakes: There are a variety of recipes online, but I didn't find one that was just what I wanted. Instead, I used a basic vanilla cupcake recipe (for 12 cupcakes) and added a single, small packet of Pink Lemonade Kool-Aid powder mix to the batter. I purchased white frosting in a plastic can and likewise added a single packet of the Kool-Aid to it as well. Pretty and pink and easy!

Homemade Sugar Cubes: Sandra and Beth have had these before, but I didn't realize they were new to my friend Liz. Couldn't be easier to make: Take a cup of sugar. Add one drop of food coloring and about a tablespoon of water, just enough to give the consistency of wet sand. Mix. Pack into those plastic candy molds from Michaels (they're about a dollar or so), and immediately turn out onto waxed paper or a plate to dry overnight. Took me about 20 minutes, start to finish, to make a few dozen of these in yellow and pink. I actually ended up with two sugar bowls on the table (including this vintage vase I used as a sugar bowl) because I made so many of the sugars.

Shrimp Salad: Again, I couldn't find the perfect recipe that used lemon, which I wanted to feature, so I improvised and really liked the result. I made these with the butterfly garnishes using the Pepperidge Farm butter crackers I once wrote about here. Here's the recipe:

Lemon-Pecan Shrimp Salad

1 (14-ounce) bag frozen, pre-cooked shrimp (thaw and remove tails before using, or use equivalent amount of cooked fresh shrimp)
1/2 cup pecans
2 ribs celery
2 teaspoons lemon zest
2 green onions, chopped
1/4 teaspoon each of white pepper, salt and garlic salt, or to taste
2-3 tablespoons mayonnaise (just enough to hold mixture together)

In bowl of food processor, add shrimp, pecans and celery. Pulse a few times until pieces are small enough for salad consistency. Pour into mixing bowl, add remaining ingredients and combine. Season to taste. Yields approximately 2 cups of mixture.

A "Celebrate Spring" Tea Party!

Yesterday was the long-awaited day of my "Celebrate Spring" tea party. As soon as I heard the doorbell ring, I set out these Lemon-Pecan Shrimp Salads with butterfly garnishes atop Royal Winton's Welbeck chintz salad plates in sunny yellow. The girlfriends at this tea had once discussed how much we would enjoy an all-lemon teatime menu, so many of the teawares and recipes featured the colors and flavors of lemons.

The guests at this tea were some of my closest tea-loving friends, Sandra, Beth and Liz. Sandra and Beth are mother and daughter and I have truly been blessed to be friends with both of them. (Liz did not wish to be photographed, and I felt compelled to obey since, as the saying goes, "she knows too much.")

Besides the Shrimp Salad, the other savories were Cucumber Sandwiches, Cream Cheese and Chives Sandwiches (some with edible lavender blossoms), Egg-Olive Salad Ribbon Sandwiches and Asparagus Rollups.

Our scones were Cranberry Scones made from a mix I won in a giveaway on Bernideen's blog late last year. The Sticky Fingers scones could not have been any easier (add 3/4 cup water and mix!), and everyone said they were delicious. I was surprised a scone from a mix could taste this light and fluffy but these were just terrific, and I will gladly buy this mix next time I see it in a store.

I made up my own recipe for Pink Lemonade Cupcakes.

They were served on individual glass domed stands and dressed up by tea-themed cupcake wrappers I have been saving for just such an occasion!

Our other sweets were these Lemon Madeleines and Cherry-Pecan Brownies. I also made Lemon Truffles and Hazelnut Thumbprint Cookies with Marmalady's Pear-Lemon Marmalade, but I forgot to get close-ups of those two. (I hate when I do that!) And since this is getting a bit long-winded for a Monday morning, I'll wind things up with a few more photos. If you come back tomorrow, I'll share some recipes and a few other tidbits from the tea!

Tea and Books Saturday #15 - "Teatime"

Teatime
By The Tea Ambassador, Aubrey Franklin
Frederick Fell Publishers, 1981

Back in 1974, the tea industry here in the U.S. was in need of some promotional help, so Aubrey Franklin was enlisted by the Tea Council of the U.S.A. and given the title "Tea Ambassador." The man's resume is pretty fascinating. In World War II, Franklin served as official war photographer with Field Marshall Montgomery at El Alamein. By 1961, he had moved to the U.S., and 10 years later he opened a restaurant in Manhattan. This book is his delightful effort at promoting the greater enjoyment of tea and teatime, and I knew I was going to like it when I saw a chapter titled "Why People Should Drink Tea."

First things first: The most noteworthy thing to know about Franklin is that he invented, he says, the "Elevensey Cup." What's that? I own a couple, and I'll bet you do too. Named for the British custom of taking a tea break at 11 a.m., it's a tea mug with a lid designed to keep the tea as hot as possible while steeping. And Franklin is very big on keeping that tea water hot-hot-hot while preparing tea. I've long read that one should take "the pot to the kettle" rather than "the kettle to the pot," and Franklin tells us precisely why this is so. "Never take the kettle to the teapot, as you lose one degree of heat per second, and hot water for tea must be 212 degrees." (When I run out of tea activities to try, maybe I'll conduct my own experiment one day.)

About half the book is filled with recipes, often accompanied by amusing cartoonish illustrations of the ambassador himself, wearing his pith helmut as shown on the cover and sometimes in interesting, if unexplained, settings. (I daresay this is the only tea book you'll ever come across which includes an illustration of a stripper popping out of a cake next to a Tea Ambassador.) The recipes themselves are quite charming and infused with lots of tea history. In the section on savories, for instance, Franklin says the earliest reference to savories was in the Victorian period. He notes that Queen Victoria liked Marrow Toasts, and her son Edward VII loved Canapes Diane (Mushroom Toast). There are lots of traditional British recipes - crumpets, Sally Lunns, fish and chips, cornish pasties - and plenty of interesting tidbits that will make this a fun read for today's tea lover.

Vintage Tea Sandwiches

Do you think 10 different kinds of finger sandwiches is too many for four people? You do? I was afraid of that! I'm having three girlfriends over for tea on Sunday afternoon, and while I always love to put together the menu I always want to try far more finger sandwiches than we could ever eat, so I'm having to whittle down my list of sandwiches. For inspiration, I consulted a vintage booklet I found on eBay, the Manor Sandwich Book. There is no publication date, but it sure looks fifties or sixties era to me. Since I've seen the same booklet listed on eBay with the exact same cover but a different baker listed as sponsor, I'm guessing this booklet was used as a promotional item which the various companies could then personalize. Today, I thought I'd share some of the pages from the booklet in case you'd like to double-click the images and check out these finger sandwich ideas for yourself. Enjoy!

Tea & Violets

Violets will always be in my top 10 of favorite flowers, and on Easter afternoon I picked some wild violets — both out in the yard and from the teawares in my tea cabinet! I was surprised to learn many gardeners consider wild violets weeds and take great pains to kill them, since that's not at all what I plan to do with them.

A few years back I bought these great old violet dishes at the Carriage House in Senoia. Months went by, and one day in the mail I received from the owner, Nancy, some matching butter pats she had come across and decided I needed. Can you imagine how touched I was to receive these?

I love the image as well as the faint crackling you can see in this detail from one of the butter pats. (And by the way, don't you wish we used things like butter pats more often? I do!)

Violets are also featured on this newer teacup, a Royal Albert Purple Violets one I received for Christmas last year.

Weeds? Some people call these weeds?

Surely the teacup makers of yesteryear would not have adorned their wares with weeds!

The other reason I was picking flowers is because I have a tea-themed pressed flower project in mind for them. (If it turns out well, I'll share it here one day, of course.)

For my Easter tea drinking, I enjoyed multiple cups of Harney's Ti Guan Yin. It is such a delicious, refreshing oolong tea, and the floral aroma was just perfect for my flowery frame of mind!

Weeds? I think not!

A rose for tea lovers

This is obviously my week to get birthday presents early! Even though my birthday is a month away, my friend Deberah at work called me to her office on Monday to laughingly report that the birthday gift she had ordered for me had arrived much earlier than she had anticipated. She was so apologetic, but I am just thrilled! Even the box is pretty!

In fact, I got home that evening and (with help from DH) the rose was soaked in water for a bit and then went right in the ground!

Why am I so excited about a rose plant? Because it's the rose I've been wanting, the David Austin English rose Tea Clipper! This apricot colored, tea-scented rose (see it here) was patented in 2006 and honors the centenary of the death of tea trader Frederick Horniman.

I'll be babying this new plant for sure, and wouldn't it be lovely if it bloomed in May for my birthday?

Pinehurst Tea Gardens and U.S. tea history

After visiting the Charleston Tea Plantation a few years ago, I became especially interested in anything related to the history of tea here in the U.S. And while I had known Summerville, S.C., as a great town for shoppers (and especially quilters), it wasn't until the Charleston Tea Plantation tour that I learned Summerville was actually the home of Pinehurst Tea Gardens, site of some early tea growing here. Since then, I've been on the lookout for anything even remotely related to the tea growing operations at Pinehurst. This unused postcard from 1908 shows a driveway at the Pinehurst Tea Gardens. On Friday I showed this vintage postcard photo of azaleas at Pinehurst, and last year I wrote about this postcard from Pinehurst Tea Gardens.



Here's another postcard, and I find it interesting that a Pinehurst Tea Farm cottage was so important it was the subject of a postcard scene. Does that mean visitors from out of town came to Summerville just to visit the tea plantation there? Or was it merely a local attraction of interest to the Charlestonians who are said to have escaped the town's stifling summer heat by heading to Summer-ville? (I had a real "Aha!" moment when I learned where Summerville got its name!)

When reading Sarah Rose's "For All the Tea in China" recently, I was delighted to find a few paragraphs at the end of the book revealing that Robert Fortune himself was hired by the U.S. Patent Office in 1857 to bring tea seeds to America. By now Fortune was quite an expert at this tea hunting business, and Rose says that "as soon as the cases arrived in Washington, the commissioner of U.S. patents unceremoniously fired Fortune, presumably in the belief that American gardeners could take care of the by now flourishing seedlings. ... By 1859 some thirty thousand well-rooted plants from Fortune's shipment were available for distribution to plantations in the South. By 1860 the dispersal of tea seeds and plants had become a significant portion of the work of the Patent Office's agricultural division." But of course the Civil War would interrupt these well-laid plans, and Rose says that by the war's end, the lack of slave labor meant American tea could not compete with tea from Asia. The 1900s-era postcards, however, make it clear that competitive or not, some sort of tea operation was still going on in Summerville in 1926.

So, I continue to collect what tidbits I can about the brief history of tea growing efforts in this country. At an antique mall the other day, I came across (for just $2.50) this 1908 Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, which contained yet more info on the tea growing operations in Summerville. So I'll end with a few scans from the book (double click and you'll be able to see them well), and if you happen to come across any further information related to tea growing at Pinehurst, I'd love to hear about it!

A very "moving" teapot gift

Have you ever come across a present you weren't supposed to get until later? I did on Saturday, but I was helping my parents pack to move into their new house, and it's certainly not my fault this gift wasn't hidden better!


I don't mean to be a teapot snob here, but I normally don't care for figural teapots. With display space already at a premium, I just can't spare the space for a teapot shaped like a television, or an elephant or a squash. I want my teapots to be round, English and have flowers on them, and that's about it. But this one? Well, this one I loved! So I was quite amused when my mom confessed it was a thrift store find she had intended for my birthday next month, but I could go ahead and take it now. "You'll have to find the cream pitcher yourself," she said. Will do!

The teapot is marked 40 oz., OCI, and when I researched that mark on eBay, I came across a number of OCI teapots made by the Omnibus division of Fitz and Floyd. I hope that one day I'll come across the matching piece, though I'm delighted with the two I received on Saturday by happy accident!

Flowers have been my obsession all spring, and on Saturday I explored the grounds at the new house and took a few photos I thought I'd share with my fellow flower lovers here. (I must confess I'm hoping to beg a few cuttings in the coming days, so hopefully some of these lovelies will be in my own garden eventually!) In order of floral appearance are camellias, above, and flowering crabapple, dwarf pink flowering almond, flowering quince, a redbud tree, jonquils, periwinkle and muscari, which is appropriately enough held by my niece Cari. Thanks for humoring me with my "moving" story from the weekend!