The Never-Ending Tea Party

I am neither professionally trained, nor do I harbour any illusions as to the lot of a pastry chef. Just attempting some ambitious dessert for some ambitious dinner party is taste enough - all that blood, sweat and tears, imagine it intensified and multiplied over an intimidating scale, add an artery-popping dose of stress...I get the picture. Not that I find the process joyless - far from. What is happiness if you don't get to know pain a little better?

So imagine my reaction when Chubby Hubby and S asked if I would cater an event they were organizing on behalf of Gryphon Tea Company - I think the best way to sum it up would be to say I was as excited as I was freaked out by the prospect. Despite the fear factor, I took the plunge in the end for a very simple reason - I really like the product.

When it comes to matters of presentation, my personal inclination is towards the bold and graphic rather than the cute and precious, but keeping the Alice in Wonderland theme in mind was surprisingly easy. In fact, I'll go so far as to confess that I wholeheartedly embraced the twee and thoroughly enjoyed the excuse to revel in the girlishness of it all.

Not wanting to take any chances, I went with tried-and-tested recipes which I then tweaked to fulfil the requirements in the looks and size department. But taste and looks aside, the recipes chosen for the tea party menu would also have to meet a very pragmatic criteria - not having kitchen facilities at my disposal at the venue, all items had to be prepared ahead of time, keep well, travel well, and require the minimum of fuss in terms of last minute finishing.

The Devil's Food Cupcakes with White Chocolate & Espresso Topping, and Vanilla Cupcakes with Truffle Cream Topping are based on recipes from Michael Recchiuti & Fran Gage's Chocolate Obsession. Ultra-moist, they were also eminently suited to being up-sized or shrunk.

The recipe for Straits Chai Spice Bundt is adapted from one in Marcy Goldman's The Best of BetterBaking.com, which I've previously written about (PS: The whimsical little flags were a stroke of sheer genius on S's part.) As for the Raspberry & Chocolate Cake, the original recipe can be found in Alice Medrich's Bittersweet - cocoa-rich and laced with fresh raspberry puree (which also ensures a very soft and tender crumb), it's one of those wonderful cakes that seem to taste best when left to rest overnight. In other words, ideal for the occasion.

Notice a recurring motif? It goes without saying Linzer Cookies would feature (I like the recipe from Carole Walter's Great Cookies). The delicate, friable texture comes from the addition of sieved hard-boiled egg yolks and ground almonds, while the rich flavour is thanks to cinnamon and citrus zest. Besides the classic sandwich with raspberry jam and tiny shapes (a nifty by-product from stamping out windows for the top half of the cookie sandwiches, which I decorated with coloured sugar), I also made a few large, Christmas ornament-style numbers for dramatic effect. The fun bit comes when giving the cut-outs a stained glass effect - there are many recipes which will tell you it's as easy as crushing some hard candies to fill the cut-outs and letting the oven do the rest. What they don't usually tell you is that some candy melts beautifully, others don't - definitely a trial and error process. For fool-proof shimmering crystalline panes every time, check out the method in The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion - bring mixture of sugar and corn syrup to hard-crack stage (300 to 310 °F), colour and flavour as you wish, then use syrup to fill the cut-outs; the syrup cools and sets into candy centers.

The rest of the cookie assortment: Chocolate Shortbread, Checkerboard Cookies (both recipes adapted from Nick Malgieri's Cookies Unlimited), and Orange Vanilla Shortbread (from Sherry Yard's The Secrets of Baking). My favourite cookie of the bunch (the Lavishly Lemony ones, also from Carole Walter's Great Cookies) happens to be the one I didn't get a chance to take a picture of - I took these photographs after the fact, of "spares" I'd left at home. W, as it turns out, liked them as much as I did.

Catering for 20 to 25 people was made manageable as small group sessions were staggered throughout the day. What this also meant was that the never-ending tea party, mid-way through the veritable Groundhog Day, felt like the day that would never end. For sure, I'm in no rush to go call upon the decorative values of sweetheart paillettes, sweetheart nesting cutters or sweetheart molds anytime soon (and you won't catch me listening to Chris Isaak). But would I do it again? In a heartbeat. The planning, the build-up, the process, the adrenaline rush - there's nothing like it.