tea | Before I Kick

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Let me take you back in time. To Mother’s Day. As a gift I bought my mum a Groupon for Chocolate-Lovers afternoon tea at the London Hilton on Park Lane. It was a very popular Groupon (for obvious reasons) so we only got to use it a few months later because they were all booked up.

List Item: Take afternoon tea
Progress: Completed

Afternoon tea is such an English thing and I freakin’ love it. I have only had it twice before and both of these were at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. So I was interested how a highly-starred hotel in Mayfair would do this. If you are not aware of what an afternoon tea entails I will be going through each stage.

Firstly, there is the selection of teas. If you are not a fan of tea you CAN get other things like coffee or soft drinks but it tends to cost more (and if you want champagne you are looking at £10-15 a glass at most places). Here I went for a jasmine flower green tea which, in this picture, I over-sweetened since it was sugar cubes rather than packets. Still, a good tea is a good start.

Food Item: Cucumber

The first part of the cream tea is the sandwiches. Now in this tea there were five open-faced sandwiches: egg mayonnaise, salmon, cucumber and cream cheese, ham and prawn. This is a fairly normal selection (apart from the prawn) but in many other places you get finger sandwiches which you can ask for a second helping of (my mum’s usual tactic which means she gets full very quickly). The egg here was more a moose than a traditional mayonnaise.

Food Items: Scones and Chocolate Spread

Since this was a chocolate-lovers tea we got chocolate spread with the tea. This is not common. The clotted cream and strawberry jam, however, is. Now there is a discussion on the proper way to set up your scone. I use the Devon method which is to first spread the clotted cream on your scone half and then top this with the jam. My mum apparently goes down the Cornish route and does it the opposite way around. I have overheard serious discussions on this topic… I think it tastes good either way so who really cares.

Next is some cake, in this case a blueberry cupcake and a white chocolate cupcake with pistachio icing. What cake you get really depends on the area and how much you paid. Other possible cakes include Victoria sponge, lemon drizzle, battenberg, and other more traditional English fayre.

At this point I usually finish my first pot of tea and get a second. If possibly, a different flavour… something that did not work out this time since the second tea I had was vile.

Of course we were stuffed by the time we were meant to eat these REALLY fancy chocolate fancies. You see that plate with the sunflowers? Painted white chocolate which was also delicious. Since we couldn’t eat these we got them to go and consumed them the next day.