Afternoon tea with focus on liquorice

This afternoon I will be serving afternoon tea for two good friends, where the focus will be on liquorice, actually a lot of liquorice, and a little bit of Valentine Romance. Already now people working within the health care will start to see major health problems in form of increased blood pressure from this intake of liquorice. However, we as Danes needs to increase/adjust our blood pressure in order to survive the depressing winter season with reduced sun light !!!!
My foreign working colleagues were very disgusted, when I shared this afternoon tea menu with them, they simply DO NOT understand the Danish pleasure of liquorice.

When Hannibal the Cat noticed, that I was laying out the tea table, he decided to join in being an important part of the decoration. One of my two tea friends is suffering from allergy against animals, so he is a very special good friend of Hannibal the Cat, who always concentrate his attention on him.

The menu for this afternoon tea is:

• Valentine Sparkling Cocktail
• Valentine Romance Scones
• Lønnestræde´s Walnut bun with rye and wheat
• Marble cake with liquorice a la Klidmoster
• Liquorice Meringue Muffin
• Liquorice Dreams
• Caramel with liquorice a la Klidmoster
• Various teas with liquorice notes

I am first publishing this post, when my tea guests are arriving, as I know they are regular readers, so I would like to keep the menu a secret until they are actually in-side my kitchen. And I will be sharing all the different recipe in the coming days.

We have a saying here in Denmark: When the cat is washing their fur, you will get guests. Yes, it is true :-)

Tea tasting at Simply Tea

What did you learn in tea school (today) ? 

We have a Danish song, where the sentence "what did you learn in school today ?" is repeat over and over again.

In beginning of February I went to tea school together with some good tea friends of mine having a tea tasting session at Simply Tea in Århus. The school leader is Alexis Kaae, the owner of Simply Tea.

So what did I learn in tea school ?

• Use the correct water temperature for your tea - depends on the tea type - temperature between 40-100'C. 
• Use soft water = water with a very low calcium content. So buy "soft" bottle water for white, green and yellow !!! Black tea should be OK with more hard water which means I still use the tap water in my kitchen, as I black tea drinker.
• You can re-use high quality tea between 4-8 time, just adding new water into the tea pot.
• Green and white tea energise you, while black tea calms you. Perhaps this is the explanation, why I such a big fan of black tea, as I have enough energy on my own.
• I really dislike Japanese tea due to the strong flavour of spinach.
• The white, yellow and green tea is too sophisticate for my taste buds. I personally prefer the more "plain" flavour of black tea, and addition of various flavouring oils like in Earl Grey is just perfect for me and my tea pot.

A part of the tasting session was afternoon tea meal should be served as well. As I came directly from work, I had not eaten any evening meal, so I had some expectation about this afternoon tea meal being my evening meal.

Yes, we were served egg sandwich and salmon sandwich, scones with whipped cream and jam, macaroon made with green tea. And finally a cookie containing Earl Grey.
However, the amount of food a little low in my opinion, if you have had no evening meal.

I went home a tin of white tea flavoured with jasmine flowers, as I am flower power girl :-) I will keep you posted on, how I evaluate this tea.

Product test 6 - Urtekram dinner kit Morocco meal

I have been taking another step towards the finishing line trying the entire range of dinner kits from Urtekram, the first being whole grain lasagna and the second being chicken with cinnamon and curry . And the third box tested in my kitchen is Morocco meal made with yet another portion of chicken, as I could not find any fresh lamb in the supermarket. For me the suggestion of using pork meat is not the best recommendation having the idea of Morocco in mind !!!

I used a mix of tomatoes, squash and carrots as vegetable in this dish. And again I find he entire cooking time of 20 minutes after addition of the vegetables is too long, if you prefer NOT to have over-boiled vegetable. So here I would suggest 15 minutes instead of.

For me Morocco food is interesting flavour combination of lemon, mint, raisins and cinnamon. This dinner kit is NOT fulfilling these expectation of mine, the flavour is not really there as all, just being very boring.

Asking myself again, would I pay full price for this Morocco meal dinner kit ? And again my answer would be NO.

Anton´s Yndlingsbrød - Anton´s favourite bread

"Hjemmebagt" - 73 recipes - 14 accomplished = 59 recipes to bake

I got going again on my task to bake my way through the baking book called "Hjemmebagt". This time I tried out the recipe called Anton´s favourite bread, which I actually turned into buns instead of, as I have more rooms to store small portions of buns in my freezer than one big loaf of bread.

The flour in Anton´s Yndlingsbrød is a mix of wheat, rye and durum flavour. Besides from this there is maple syrup, buttermilk, sesame oil, sesame kernels and white poppy seeds. As I was kneading the dough together I had a wonderful flavour of sesame in my nose.

Just before baking the buns I decided to any some more sesame kernels as decorations on the buns. I got 14 buns of this bread recipe, so now I again have some buns in my freezer, I heat up a frozen bun in the microwave oven, which turns it into bun, which looks like it has just come out of the oven.

Tea Time Treat January 2012 - acceptance of banana bread

It was very exciting for me to see, that my entry in form of a banana bread with raisins and walnuts made into the Tea Time Treats January 2012 round :-).

I am now in the "thinking box" about, what I should create for the February Tea time Treat challenge, which is about Romance, I assume coming from Valentine´s Day, turned into puddings, pies, desserts, scones, biscuits, tarts and cakes. So fare I have thought about making scones.

Please feel free to leave a comments, if you should have great suggestions, which you would like to share with me, regarding add-ins for the scones or if you think I should give a go at some of the others items.

Muffin fund raising for "Cupcakes for Africa"

Monday evening I saw, that some day-care moms were collecting money through www.cupcakesforafrika.dk, which is forwarding the money to the fund raising event called "Danmarks Indsamlingen" here in Denmark, where money is collected for children in Africa. I am not working as a day-care mom, but perhaps you can call work "day-care" for grown-ups ?

As I had a cake tin full of these banana-carrot-walnut muffin in my kitchen I got thinking about, if my work colleagues would like to participate in a muffin fund raising donating money to this "Cupcakes to Afrika". It was actually a bit out of my own comfort zone doing this. It is one thing to share cake/muffin left-overs with work colleague to actual ask them to put money in a cup, before grabbing a muffin for their afternoon coffee/tea. Perhaps I would stand there on my own with a tin full of muffins OR my colleague would not like the taste of the muffin !!!!!

So today I took this small step for mankind, but one giant leap for me inviting my work colleagues to muffin fund raising at an afternoon coffee/tea break. And it turned out to be a perfect 

WIN - WIN - WIN -WIN SITUATION

WIN - I got to unfold my baking creativity trying out new recipes

WIN - I got my colleagues to eat excess calories from my kitchen

WIN - my work colleagues got a home-made muffin for their afternoon coffee/tea

WIN - children in Africa receive money to various help programmes

As a starting donation I had asked for 5 DKK/person coming eating muffin, which one of my colleagues said was a low price for him compared to paying 15 DKK for a muffin at 7-11. 13 work colleagues turned up for the event, where we shared 8 muffins between us and in total 91 DKK was donated, which equals 11,375 DKK/muffin, so we actual got quiet close to the muffin sale price in 7-11 !!!!

I would like to share a big THANK YOU to all my work colleagues, who both supported me on this muffin fund raising as well as providing me with all their positive response to this idea of mine :-)

Tea tasting session at Simply Tea

I am really looking forward to this evening, where some friends and I will participate in a tea tasting session at Simply Tea in Århus http://www.simplytea.dk/, where we last year enjoyed having afternoon tea. 

I hope to learn some interesting new things about tea and how to make a perfect cup of tea. I will share the key learning with you in the near future.