28 May 2007

Tea For Four

Support me in my bid to raise money for the Children's Cancer Foundation through Hair For Hope 2007. Read more about it here.

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Catching up with girlfriends over tuna mayo sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches and onion relish open face sandwiches couldn't feel more chic. Add cranberry/raisin scones and pseudo-treacle tarts to the menu and the gathering over tea was complete. It wasn't perfect, owing to the treacle tarts that never were due to some mistrust of a certain recipe. But more importantly, it was a simple enough menu to prepare in a few hours, and fuelled us more than adequately for a long evening of gossip.

Simple Strawberry Jam
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When a menu whittles down into something so simple - sandwiches and a dessert, I tend to look at even the simplest of things that we often buy off the shelves.
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Mayonnaise - while requiring just a tad more effort on your part, is definitely not overly complicated and is extremely gratifying when something so ethereally light and delicate has been achieved. Combine it with tuna flakes for incredibly tasty and fluffy tuna-mayo sandwiches.
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Strawberry Jam - is usually almost as easy to make your own jam than it is to buy from the grocery stores. It is important to add slightly less sugar than is required in the recipe however, just in case you don't have a sweet tooth. I'm still learning how to adjust it to the average person's tastebuds since I am known to have a really high tolerance for the sweets.

Bitter Spiced Marmalade


If you have slightly more time to spare, you might want to consider making a Bitter Spiced Marmalade. Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me remember where I got the recipe from, and what the exact proportions were for the recipe. It did require a fair amount of time, simmering the oranges for 40 minutes to remove some of the bitterness commonly found in the skin, and chopping them before simmering them with sugar and spices.

However, I still found it a worth my time at the end of the day. I am slowly beginning to appreciate incorporating some of the bitterness of oranges in desserts, and in this case jam. It was a great counterbalance to the sweetness and spices (admittedly, I may have been a little heavy handed with the cinnamon and cloves). I also kept it rustically chunky, although a part of me was also inclined to keeping it in big chunks to save me a little bit of time and effort.

My girlfriends may have preferred the strawberry jam to the marmalade, but my mum and I finished the marmalade in no time in the following days. Always, always make a little more jam than you think you need for the day, so that you can have a sublime breakfast the next day.

Luxurious homemade jam with freshly baked, crisp, flaky croissants (get them frozen Swiss Bake - Takashimaya, Cold Storage Guthrie House/Centrepoint/Holland V/KAP) surely cannot be faulted.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Daffy, have you applied for Le Cordon Bleu yet?

Anonymous said...

No I haven't! You've got some lobang?

Anonymous said...

really like ur plates. where did u get them?

Anonymous said...

I was at a friend's place, dog sitting, so I just used her plates. Sorry no idea where they were from.