hosting afternoon tea

As I mentioned in a previous post, for Mother's Day this year, me and my sisters decided to do something a little bit special for our mum. Obviously she is special EVERY day of the year, but this one felt different. It is her first Mother's Day as a grandma, and mine (as a mum...) and she has done so much for me through the course of my pregnancy and these first few months.

After some deliberation, and eliminating shopping, meal, drinks and spa day from my list, I decided to take her for champagne afternoon tea at the HIilton. Lovely! Only, the Hilton sabotaged my plans by being fully booked on Mother's Day. As did Harvey Nichols, The Midland, Richmond Tea Rooms and every other place I could think of. But, rather than give up, I decided to do it myself.

I have just moved into a new house with a lovely conservatory, (ooooh!) so it was the logical place to hold it. I prayed for a sunny day and began planning.

I'm not a planner. Not a planner of parties anyway. What if nobody came? (Ha ha only joking they had to, they are my sisters.) So I started by googling pictures of afternoon tea researching what a typical afternoon tea consisted of, and the general gist was tea, finger sandwiches, scones, and cake. I could do that!

First, I hit eBay and Amazon for the little touches that would make a lovely afternoon tea. I confess I am somewhat of a tea and cake lover already, so I already had a tea pot, (or 8) antique side plates, and cake forks. I made a list of what I needed.

Tea cups (I ordered and used these last minute, because some mismatched tea cups I had ordered from eBay didn't arrive in time. Now I have plenty of tea cups...)
Champagne flutes (Which I borrowed from my grandparents! I was going to buy some plastic ones but my nans antique ones were much nicer!)
Table cloth (I bought a vintage one from eBay, I had wanted one for ages anyway. But there are loads of pretty table cloths on there!)
Napkins (I just bought a packet of plain pink ones from Tesco, much of the decoration was floral and kitsch and I thought plain napkins and plain teacups prevented it from looking too over the top.)
Cake stand (Which I got from here)
School style milk jugs
Red stripe straws (I got both the jugs and the straws from here which is a lovely website, but you can find them in many places, etsy, eBay, amazon are the first that come to mind.)

I also went to Home Bargains for something un-afternoon tea related, and came across a little vintage party section (who knew?!) and picked up some little sweetie tubs and bunting.

Next was to decide what to serve food wise. After some research I found that some traditional sandwich choices for afternoon tea are ham, salmon,and cucumber, all quite simple. You can jazz them up, we had salmon and cream cheese, ham, and cucumber and cream cheese, on white and brown bread. The sandwiches should be small, only two or three bites each. Cutting the crusts off makes for better presentation but you waste quite a lot of the filling so we just cut them into triangles.

Now for the important part. The cake! Obviously scones are a given. My sister baked some lovely ones using this recipe and they were lovely, served with strawberry jam and clotted cream. She also baked a fruit tea cake which is a traditional afternoon tea cake. I made a carrot cake and a lemon cake, which I will do recipe's for in future posts if anybody is interested! Then, using the sweetie tubs I had bought from Home Bargains, I filled them with my mum's favourite sweets (rhubarbs and custards, foam banana and shrimps and liquorice allsorts) and dotted them along the window ledge.

As this was a champagne afternoon tea, obviously champagne was required! We bought a bottle of De Vallois Champagne which was lovely - I am not a massive fan of champagne but this was quite smooth to drink and not too acidic, a perfect afternoon tea accompaniment! I also bought some pink lemonade to serve in the milk jugs. We were quite boring with the 'tea' aspect of the afternoon tea, as none of us are adventurous tea drinkers! So we stuck to good old Twinings English Breakfast tea, I was planning on using loose leaf tea and had bought strainers, but forgot the actual tea, duh.

Finally, there were a couple of little touches that really finished it off. I bought some brown luggage labels , and used them as place name cards. I wrote our names on them in simple black crayon, and tied them to the bottom of the champagne flutes. I also got some 'eat me' and 'drink me' tags and stuck them in the sandwiches and cake, which gave it a little touch of Alice in Wonderland! The night before I compiled an iTunes playlist of all of my mums favourite songs, all through the dinner she would say 'oh I love this song!' and 'god I love this song!' not realising I had put the list together for her, and thinking it was just a good radio day. I also put Freddie in his Sunday best for grandma's lunch!

 I wanted the day to have a traditional, yet modern and personal feel to it, and I think it did. My mum cried (you know it is a success when somebody cries...) and me, my sisters, my mum and Freddie had a lovely afternoon tea, sat in the warm, sunny conservatory drinking champagne and chatting for hours.

I hope some of you found this post helpful - I think as the weather gets warmer it would be a lovely thing to do for a birthday or special occasion!