Tea party

This afternoon we enjoyed an Easter Monday afternoon tea party: a few friends, a sunny breezy afternoon and lots of sweet treats!
I was very pleased to haul out my beautiful mismatched tea set for service. The pieces have been collected and given to me over the years by various friends and relatives, and I really love the fact that each tea cup has a story. There are a few Royal Alberts and Royal Doultons, and the pot is from Duchess, but most of the set is op-shop and garage sale material.
Until very recently, I had been searching high and low for an appropriate milk jug and sugar bowl to join my motley crew. On Easter Saturday we found them both at the big pink antiques shop on Ipswich Road at Annerley. The jug was only $15, and the bowl $3! I did have my eye on a small footed glass dish with big domed glass lid to be my sugar bowl, but it had a giant chip out of it. It reminded me of the glass dome that protects the magic rose in Beauty and the Beast. Ah.
So the jug and bowl enjoyed their maiden voyages today, their opening night, and they performed very nicely indeed. Settled in well, played well with others and so on.
Also in service today were an old floral cake stand that belonged to my grandmother, a patterned tin tray, a set of collector teaspoons featuring the native birds of Papua New Guinea and my new cake forks from Wheel and Barrow.
Treatwise, we enjoyed chocolate rocks, ginger biscuits, Easter cookies, cupcakes and chocolate spiders.
The chocolate rocks were like big crunchy golden cornflake cookies with choc chips within: thanks, Alice's mum! I have some currently residing in my freezer for future lunches. Delicious.
The ginger biscuits were very yummy: crispy spicy balls with a piece of crystallised ginger studded in the top of each one. I look forward to dunking them in some chai tea. Thanks, Meg.

The Easter cookies were a leftover from my Wednesday Night Cookie Marathon. I made Nigella's cut-out cookies from Feast, using my Easter cutters. However, as usual, I made a double batch, thinking that it would be a cinch to cut them all out, bake and ice them in one evening. Well, I managed it, but I got to bed at a quarter to midnight, after taking a break for an hour to watch House. No regrets though: it was a lot of fun. Towards the end it became a labour of love, with the emphasis on labour! On Good Friday I packaged them up and delivered them secretly to friends' doorsteps, like the Easter Bunny himself. That was a lot of fun too.

The cupcakes are the usual recipe, but with new icings. I made a rose icing for half, using pink colouring, heart sprinkles and rosewater, and a lime and coconut icing for the rest, using green colour, lime juice and shaved coconut. I think they looked very pretty.

Chocolate spiders were made by Gerry: I'm not sure of the exact method but one assumes something to do with Copha and ready-to-eat noodles. Very tasty they were, too.

I must thank Meg for arriving with her super-pro camera to photograph and document the teaparty, seeing as our camera has blown up. (We are going camera-shopping tomorrow...) Without her expert visual records, the beauty would have gone unremembered and un-displayed for the world to see. Thanks Meg!

(Who brought beer to a tea party?!? Typical Aussie boys...!)