Vicar's Kitchen: Spring TIme Tea Party

If you are anything like me (and happen to be living in the UK!) then you will have spent the last few weeks basking in this glorious Spring sunshine we have been having. It has been gorgeous - all daffodils in bloom, green fields and frolicking lambs and in my house....cake!

I decided to host a tea party for some of my closest friends as a farewell to our house. We have just short of eight weeks no until we will be en route to the new place (that we don't actually have yet...not at all stressful!) so we have begun the sad task of getting ready to leave to this lovely village that has been home for the last few years.

It seemed like a fitting last gathering for my best friends at our little abode to have a tea party. As I am now officially on vacation after the busyness of Easter I had lots of time to bake and mess around with china. And as it is such a beautiful Springtime here I dug out my daffodil tea set. It's from the 1930s and is utterly swoony.

 

No tea party is complete with scones, of course with clotted cream and jam. I suppose you have to have sandwiches too and we did find them surprisingly effective as palate cleansers in between the many, many courses of cake!

 

I went slightly into chocolate overload with the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook (well worth getting by the way). Firstly I made Brooklyn Blackout Cake which is a chocolate sponge topped with chocolate custard. This involved thickening the chocolate sauce with cornflour. This initially brought back flashbacks of a Home Economic class at school where the cornflour formed solid lumps in the middle of my sauce. Bad times. Luckily I had a little more success this time!

Brooklyn Blackout Cake from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook


I also made these incredible triple layer brownies. Think brownie, topped with cheesecake, topped with raspberry cream. My cream was a little too thin so they look a bit of a mess but my goodness, they tasted like little slices of heaven.

And last but not least I made some Lemon and Raspberry Madelines from Rachel Khoo's The Little Paris Kitchen. They are a light sponge with a raspberry centre with a lemon curd filling. You can get the recipe here.

The Madelines waiting to be baked

 

So all in all, a good afternoon seemed to be had by all. Including the dog who was utterly spent from all the attention!

 



 

Happy Spring to you all!