Sunday 14 October 2012

Au revoir from Tealicious - our maternity break!

We were planning on our afternoon teas returning after the summer of 2012 but instead we're going to be taking a longer than planned break - a maternity break as the lovely Michelle is expecting a wee bundle of joy soon.  We'll update this website when we are able to start up our afternoon teas again.  

So it's farewell for the time being from us and thanks for bearing with us!

Friday 20 July 2012

The art of the perfect scone





At Tealicious, we think scones are very important. We can’t contemplate an afternoon tea without scones with cream and jam – it’s not right, as Michelle would say. Seeing as we’re on a wee break for the summer, we’re sharing our scone baking tips and recipe with you so here's what we do to make our scones perfect.

  • The best known tip is don’t over-mix and one that we can’t stress enough. Using a round bladed knife, bring the mixture round until it just looks like a dough. An overworked mixture makes for harder scones and if you can avoid kneading them they’ll be light and fluffy. This means when it comes for the dough to be cut, don’t roll the mixture, just pat down lightly.
  • Keep the mixture as cold as possible, particularly the butter. Some people even grate frozen butter directly into the flour. This helps the dough lift and gives a good height to a scone – once the butter melts in the mixture in a hot oven; it leaves little layers of steam pockets which makes the dough rise. The longer the butter takes to melt, the higher the pockets will be. 
  • We use a recipe that has buttermilk in it – the acidity helps the mix to rise to a good size. If you can’t get hold of any buttermilk (or don’t fancy buying any for the purposes of just making scones), you can add some lemon juice to natural yoghurt or milk as a substitute – here’s a handy guide as to how much you should use. 
  • When cutting your scone shapes, make sure the cutters are floured and don’t twist them, just press. Otherwise you’ll have wonky shaped (but still tasty) scones.
  • A glaze added just before they’re popped into the oven helps colour the baked scone and gives a nice texture – we use either buttermilk (Michelle) or a double coating of beaten egg and sprinkle of Demerara sugar (Katey).
  • Flavours can add an unexpected edge – particularly when paired with a lovely jam. Some of our favourite combinations have been whiskey scones with orange marmalade, lavender scones with lemon cream, stem ginger scones with fig jam.
  • Eat scones as soon as possible. They’re always best on the same day.


Buttermilk Scones – adapted from BBC Good Food


Ingredients

225g self raising flour
¼ tsp salt
50g butter, cut into small pieces and chilled for at least 10 minutes
25g caster sugar
125ml buttermilk (or buttermilk substitute)
4 tbsp whole milk 
Glaze: extra buttermilk or 1 beaten egg, plus Demerara sugar


Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200C and line a baking tray.
2. To a large mixing bowl, add flour and salt. Rub in the chilled butter with your fingers to make a reasonably fine crumbed mixture, lifting to aerate the mixture as you go. Try not to rub too much, the mixture should look a bit sandy. Stir in the sugar with a round bladed knife.
3. Measure the buttermilk into a small jug then mix in the milk (ensure that the liquid ingredients are chilled from the fridge, or put the jug in the fridge for 10 minutes). Make a well in the middle of the flour mixture with your knife then pour in most of the buttermilk mixture, holding a little bit back in case it's not needed. Using the knife, gently work the mixture together until it forms a soft, almost sticky, dough. Work in any loose dry bits of mixture with the rest of the buttermilk. Don't overwork at this point or you will toughen the dough.
4. Lift out the dough onto a lightly floured surface and turn over. Knead the mixture lightly if required just 3-4 times to get rid of the cracks (this step may not be necessary depending on your dough).
5. Pat the dough gently with your hands to a thickness of around 2.5 cm. Dip a cutter into a bowl of flour then cut out the scones by pushing down quickly and firmly on the cutter with the palm of your hand. Gently gather the trimmings lightly then pat together and cut out more scones.
6. Place on a baking sheet and glaze with buttermilk or beaten egg and sprinkle with Demerara sugar if desired. Bake for 8-10 minutes for mini scones or 10-12 minutes for bigger scones, until risen and golden in colour. Cool on a wire rack and serve with clotted cream and jam.

Monday 4 June 2012

Parisian Afternoon Tea

The Tealicious ladies are a bit in love with everything Parisian right now.  We have mini obsessions with so many Parisian things - Rachel Khoo's fabulous Little Paris Kitchen series, David Lebovitz's blog, the Paris, My Sweet book and Richard Bertinet's new book, Pastry (not to mention a slightly perplexing older man crush on Michel Roux Jr by one of us); we knew we had to have a Parisian afternoon tea very soon.  In our enthusiasm for the theme, we had a lot of ideas and made a lot of cake - check out our menu here.  Luckily we had our handy takeaway boxes so people could take home what they didn't quite have room for.  See below for pictures of the day!

Petite treats - Scones, Paris brest, pear & chocolate financier,
rose & raspberry macaron, raspberry & lemon madeleines

Gougeres, palmiers and red onion, goats cheese & fig tarts


Fraisier - a strawberry and cream cake


Inside the fraisier - filled with strawberries


Creme brulee cheesecake - fun with blowtorches!

The sugar syrup from the brulee was a divine flavour


Cherry charlotte russe

Tuesday 22 May 2012

Retro Sweeties Afternoon Tea

We had two events this month with our retro sweeties theme.  It was great fun thinking up things to make for this theme - essentially taking of our favourite old fashioned sweets and incorporating them into our favourite cakes, a perfect pairing.  I think we were especially pleased with the rhubarb & custard tarts, homemade honeycomb for the eclairs, cherry cola macarons and the raspberry ripple cheesecake.  The mint choc chip cake was mahoosive and looked (and tasted!) pretty spectacular too - we were especially thrilled that it was chosen for the Cake With A View blog.  You can see our full menu here but here's some pictures for you to enjoy. 


3 tiers of loveliness - buttermilk scones, raspberry marshmallows,
honeycomb eclairs, lemon sherbet cake and rhubarb & custard tarts.
Mint choc chip vienetta cake
And the inside...!
Our savouries - caramelised onion tarts, pumpkin scones and gougeres
Lemon sherbet cakes and retro sweeties!
 
Raspberry ripple chessecake and soor ploom teacake

Sunday 1 April 2012

Cocktails & Canapes afternoon tea

Another beautiful day in Edinburgh and a lovely day to enjoy an afternoon tea!  Sunshine seems to put everyone in a happy mood and it was a really lovely atmosphere at our cocktails and canapés event.  We had so many great ideas for cakes for this afternoon tea, we ended up going a little bit overboard and we had a lot of cake - no bad thing we say... One of our favourite things was our 'Del Boy' style Blue Hawaii cakes - Malibu soaked coconut sponge with pineapple and passion fruit curd, topped with Blue Curacao buttercream and maraschino cherry.  We also loved our White Russian Nanaimo Bars - these are a Canadia treat which have three layers - a biscuity base, vodka cream icing in the middle and Kahlua ganache on top.  Michelle was excited to crack out the blowtorch to make Limoncello meringue tarts and our other top pick was the Mojito cheesecake. Check out our menu page for more details and as ever, here are some photos to enjoy.








Saturday 17 March 2012

Extra date for May...


We are so thrilled that people want to come to Tealicious and were excited that tickets for our May event sold out so quickly! As we're only a small monthly event, it means that some people aren't able to purchase tickets when they go on sale so we thought we'd put a one-off extra event on in May. The afternoon tea will have the same theme as our other May event (Old Fashioned Sweeties), and will be held on Sunday 20 May. 


Please note that we have now chosen the attendees so do not email us about this event.


If you wish to attend, we'll be allocating the spaces randomly via email so please email us at tealicious.edinburgh@gmail.com and let us know if you want one or two tickets (we can't offer more than two per person) and the names of the people attending. You will absolutely need to email us, we will not be adding people automatically from the mailing list, or adding people who tweet or send a facebook comment. We'll collect the email addresses between now and Wednesday March 21st and the places will then be selected at random - we'll let people know on Friday the 23rd of March if they're able to attend. 

Our future dates will be released to the mailing list first so if you wish to hear about Tealicious dates in the future, please sign up here!

Love and cake, Tealicious x

Monday 5 March 2012

Floral afternoon tea

Our floral afternoon tea was held yesterday and we were delighted to have a real crowd of cake lovers attend - our guests included a number of Edinburgh Cake Ladies, who really know their stuff!  We'd planned our menu so that although a lot of the cakes would floral influenced, the flavours would be incorporated into the baking so it wouldn't be like chomping on a big pack of Parma Violet sweeties or entire box of Turkish Delight! The balance seemed to work well and we were so pleased to get lots of positive comments and reviews.  Our menu is available to peruse here and in the meantime, enjoy some photos.