Afternoon Tea Baby Shower

For my "baby shower" I decided that I wanted to invite all of the female members of our family over for afternoon tea and some games. I wanted it to be a relaxed environment giving people a chance to catch up and nibble on some good food. 

I've spent time planning and choosing some yummy recipes for the gathering. I knew there'd be loads of food for the number of people but I wanted there to be lots of choice and plenty of each item so should something be more popular there was enough. I hadn't made any of the recipes before, which was part of the fun, so everything was new and exciting. It took 12 hours of baking but we ended up with a great feast of food and I think it was all very nice. I will be making posts of all of the individual baked items over the coming weeks so more detail will follow, however, I'll add in a little teaser that one of the items got 30/30!! 

All the goodies ready to be eaten

To plan and pick all the recipes I did some google searches for afternoon tea recipes, I found that the BBC food website was really helpful and gave me plenty of ideas, in fact, most of the recipes I ended up using came from there and they worked well. 

So let's start at the beginning, my first thoughts went to what savoury items we should include. I wanted a traditional tea so we couldn't have any of the pizza or crisps ideas that my mum suggested!! So we had to think a little harder. Of course sandwiches were essential but what flavours? After some thought we decided to keep it simple and go with some tried and tested fillings:

• Tuna and Sweetcorn
• Ham
• Cheese and tomato
• Smoked salmon and cream cheese

We made all the bread fresh so on Friday, using a bread machine borrowed from my mum, which was baking away producing 3 loaves for us. I cut off the crusts and made them into neat little squares, originally I was thinking of making sticks but this would have resulted in tiny sandwiches so it wasn't worth it. 

Tuna and Sweetcorn

Ham on the left and Salmon on the right

So to go with the sandwiches I wanted a couple of other items. Years ago I remembered making some mini quiches that my mum liked, I didn't still have the recipe and I haven't made them since but I thought they would be a good addition. To go with these we looked through the recipe books and chose parmesan and sunflower biscuits. 

All afternoon teas have to have scones so of course these were a necessity along with some kind of fruity cake. We decided on a a fruit tea loaf which could be neatly sliced up. 

Finally the cakes element of the meal, and this is where we had the most fun, I looked through the lists and my "short" list ended up being quite long :-\ so then came the process of narrowing it all down. I wanted a balance of fruits and chocolate so we didn't have too many similar items but I also wanted things that could be made in bite size pieces. So we finally narrowed it down to:

• Chocolate tarts
• Lemon tarts
• Double Chocolate Loaf Cake
• Bakewell Cheesecake
• Pineapple and Coconut Cupcakes

I hoped this would create a nice mixture of items and have something to suit everyone. 

The food went down very well and I only received nice comments on it all, as I said, I will be writing about each item and marking them all separately with links to the recipes. There was lots of food left over, as expected, so my guests also got to leave with goody bags of their favourite items. Poor Nanna had 2 bags of salmon sandwiches as no one else wanted those!! 

Now a quick diversion off of baking to show some of the other things we also had going on. Last minute this week we decided that some bunting might look nice around the room, so my mum rushed out on Wednesday to try and find some that we could personalise. We ended up with 3!! 

Firstly the fabric bunting, we got a fabric one from Lakeland, which was a lovely mix of colours in checks and strips. To personalise this she purchased some stickers and iron on pictures to put on each flag. She chose some baby designs and some tea party designs along with Mia's name (our expected baby). 

Fabric Bunting in room

She also got some paper bunting as back up but we decided to put these up as well. The first was a flowery design and the second had bears, horses and solid colours to mix it up. 

Flowery Bunting

Bear and Rocking Horse Bunting

These made a nice difference to the room and made it feel a little more partyish!! 

Finally I'll finish with a big thank to my mum, who worked SO hard to make my vision come to life; my husband, who was lumbered with all the cleaning and tidying up; and to my guests who came with wonderful gifts, lots of chatter and provided fun. 

Overall a great day was had, hopefully, by all. :). 

A Taster of the Week to Come

I haven't been able to do much baking recently because the Hyperemesis is still going strong, if anything it's worsened towards the end. However, in the week to come I will be doing a fair bit of baking in preparation for a family gathering under the guise of being a baby shower. I decided to just invite family but it gives all the ladies a chance to get to know each other better and share some chatter and laughter. 

Now I don't want to give too many things away at this stage, a bit of surprise is fun!! but I can give a smaller taster of what is to come. I will be spreading the posts out over a few days/weeks in order to not use all my material at once so you'll have to be patient with news on these ones. 

The plan is to create a traditional afternoon tea like one you'd get at a nice hotel or restaurant. My wonderful mother helped me achieve this look by purchasing some cakes stands for me. Most of these were purchased from BHS in the new year sale with a few additions from Hobbycraft, I believe.

So here is a selection of some of the stands that I got. I've kept this one boxed up for now but his is a lovely 2 tiered cake stand with gingerbread characters on it. 

2 Tiered Cake Stand

This is a larger single cake stand to display the whole cake on

Cream Cake Stand

 Finally this is a 3 tiered basket stand with some butterflies on the outside, this was a hobbycraft purchase. 

Butterfly Stand

We (me and my team of helpers) have organised our online shop to come on Tuesday, it's going to be quite a large shop full of goodies. As with all afternoon teas we are going to create some sandwiches, scones and cakes. No I'm not telling you any more than that but I can safely say that they'll be plenty of food and busy hive of activity here on Friday. 

Thanks to my Mother in Law we now have a table clothe for the table, completing the nice smart look we're going for. 

The rest of the baby shower won't be quite so classy as we have games planned like guess the flavour of baby food, guess my waist measurement and pin the dummy on the baby!! I hope that the reusable nappies will have arrived by then so we can all have a good study of them as well. 

So the countdown begins, this time next week hopefully people will start arriving ready to join in the fun and participate. Hopefully I'll survive the weekend and have some fun. I'll keep you posted... got a flat to clean now ready for my guests!!