June Afternoon Tea Party: "Picnic"

Happy Monday all! Here's this month's tea party write-up, and this month's theme was 'picnic'.

It was a low key affair this time, with only a handful of folk there. Here in Ireland everything really does grind to a halt during the summer holidays, and I'd say I'll be closing up the monthly tea party events until September again.

I chose 'picnic' as a theme because it's summertime, and I think of picnics when I think summer food. Picnics also tend to have savouries and fruit, which are not typical features at the tea party events. Sometimes, something different is nice. The meeting room in our community centre was decked out with some nice blankets to simulate a picnic.

I decided to try a bunch of new things for this tea party, and I made some sausage rolls with homemade rough puff pastry, and two kinds of fizzy drink: orange cream soda, and raspberry lemonade. I also made some fruit skewers.

I had never tried making puff pastry before, and for a first try it came out really well! I think I made the dough a bit wet, though, and spent too much time mixing it in the bowl before rolling and folding. But it was still super flaky and delicious! I just used some shop bought sausages, adding some extra herbs and spices.

To make the drinks, I made some simple syrup cordials and topped them up at a 1:3 ratio with sparkling water. I bought these nice glass bottles from the 2 Euro shop, but they are more style than substance; the claps don't seal the bottles fully, meaning that the drinks went flat over the course of the evening.

I skewered some melon chunks, red grapes, and halved strawberries onto some cocktail sticks. I hulled the strawberries after slicing to make them look like hearts. I was going to cut the melon also into hearts, but I didn't want to waste any scraps so I just made it into chunks.

For the sweet teeth in the room, I made some shortbread teddies holding sweeties. I lifted this idea completely from Pinterest, but swapped the suggested mixed nuts for liquorice allsorts. Some of them caught the heat a bit in the oven, but they still tasted great.

Two other women also brought some snacks too, including homemade gluten free crackers with red pepper hummus, and a platter of cucumber stars, with tomato and cream cheese, and balled melon dressed in poppy seeds.

All recipe write-ups to follow!

THIS TIME IN 2014: No blog due to family difficulties
THIS TIME IN 2013: Vegan Banana Bread (Wheat-, Dairy-, and Egg Free)