My Tea Planner
  • Home
  • About/Blog
    • Who We Are
    • Our Credentials
    • Tea Travels - Rose's Blog
    • Cakes and Tea - Kathleen's Blog
    • Contact Us
  • The Tea Book
    • The Road Back to Civilization
    • A Brief History of Tea
    • Philosophy of Tea >
      • Harmony
      • Humility
      • Respect
      • Creativity
    • Guidelines for the Host/Hostess >
      • Gathering and Greeting
      • Sharing Stories
      • Sharing Food
      • Sending the Guests Home
    • Guidelines for the Guest >
      • Respect Your Hostess/Host
      • Bring a Gift if You Wish
      • Practice Humility
      • Monitor Your Conversation
      • Arrive with a Grateful Attitude
      • Help if Help is Needed
      • Do Not Criticize
      • Leave Gracefully
      • Send a Thank You Note
    • A Checklist for Planning a Tea Party
    • Teas of the World and How to Make Tea >
      • A Sampling of Teas
      • Herbal Teas and Tisanes
      • How to Make Tea
      • Making Iced Tea
      • Tea Concentrate
      • Brewing Tea for a Crowd
    • Tea Utensils and Accessories >
      • Tea Kettle
      • Tea Pot
      • Tea Cozy
      • Teacups
      • Plates
      • Silverware
      • Teacart
      • Tea Strainer
      • Tea Infuser
      • Three-Tiered Server
      • Cream Pitcher and Sugar Bowl
      • Cake Pedestal
      • Trifle Bowl
      • Jam Pots
      • Serving Dishes, Platters, and Trays
      • Silver Tea Set or Silver Tray
      • Linens
      • Kitchen Equipment for Food Preparation
    • Tea Menu Basics >
      • Sandwiches and Savories
      • Savory Spreads and Dips
      • Scones and Tea Breads >
        • About Lemons
    • Afternoon Tea and the Four Seasons >
      • A Spring Tea
      • An Outdoor Summer Tea
      • An Autumn Afternoon Tea
      • A Winter Afternoon Tea
    • A Calendar of Tea Parties >
      • January: A Japanese New Year’s Tea
      • February: A Valentine’s Day Tea
      • March: A St. Patrick’s Day Irish Tea
      • April: An Easter Tea
      • May: A Mother’s Day Tea
      • June: A Wedding Reception Tea >
        • Lemon Yogurt Wedding Cake
      • July: A Picnic Tea
      • August: A Family Reunion Tea >
        • A North American Family Reunion Tea
        • An Eastern Mediterranean Family Reunion Tea
        • A Kosher Family Reunion Tea
        • A Scandinavian Family Reunion Tea
      • September: An Ozark Farm Harvest Tea
      • October: A Tea to Honor Our Ancestors (Dia de los Muertos)
      • November: A Post Thanksgiving Tea
      • December: A Christmas Tea >
        • In Defense of Fruitcake: Fruitcakes and Candied Fruit
    • A World of Tea Parties >
      • A Chinese Dim Sum Tea
      • A Portuguese Tea
      • A Classic British Afternoon Tea
      • An Indian Chai Party
      • A California Tea
      • A Hawaiian Tea
      • An Italian Tea
      • An American Southern Tea
      • A Russian Tea
      • A French Afternoon Tea
      • A Kosher Tea with Tradional Jewish Foods
    • Afternoon Tea for Special Occasions >
      • An Afternoon Tea for Children
      • A Tea for Our Elders
      • A Honey Bee Tea in the Garden
      • An Urban Tea on the Go
      • Tea for One
      • Afternoon Tea for a Large Group
      • A Vegan Tea
      • A Rose Tea
  • Purchase Recipes
  • Resources
    • Bibliography and Resources
    • Menu and Recipe Index
    • Commercial Food Products
    • Glossary

Cakes and Tea

Kathleen's Blog

July 2016 - The Grasshopper Chronicles or How Do We Decide What’s on the Menu?

7/5/2016

0 Comments

 
My longtime baking partner, Suzi, and I catered a bridal shower in mid-May for an older bride. We decided to base our theme loosely on pastel shades of green, yellow, and lavender. The shower was for about 30 ladies, hosted by three coworkers. The party was set at teatime, with a menu of tea foods, but with champagne punch instead of tea. There were other menu parameters as well: the shower hostesses requested non-drippy finger foods, no forks, nothing served hot, and no large cake. One of the hostesses was in charge of the punch.
 
Our job was to deliver garnished platters, ready to serve. We also had a limited budget, as we were doing this catering gig as a kind of showcase for our catering business. One of the hostesses also reminded us that the guest list included some not very adventurous eaters. Suzi also had to work the day before the event. The success of this job, as with most catering jobs, was in the planning, specifically, structuring the menu to conform to the parameters while presenting a visually delightful and delicious menu. I love this kind of puzzle! And as luck would have it, Aunt Rose was visiting on the mainland and we got to spend happy hours discussing each item on the menu and testing a few recipes together: heaven!
Picture
The springtime date of the event shaped the foods we would feature on the menu.  For spring savories, I always think shrimp with dill, but the budget did not think shrimp, at all. The first group of foods to go were the luxurious, expensive savory items, including shrimp, smoked salmon, and caviar. We focused on inexpensive, seasonal vegetables, prepared in interesting and tasty ways, keeping meats to a minimum. Our good friend chicken salad came to the rescue, served in miniature croissants in a big basket, entwined with young grape leaves and vines, banked with bunches of thyme in flower from the garden, and lined with sturdy mustard greens. Cucumber sandwiches, a tea menu staple, appeared as thicker slices of cucumber, cut in a simple flower shape with a small cookie cutter. This flower was nestled on herbed cream cheese spread atop buttermilk bread rounds, served open-faced. We had purchased some fancy skewers and wanted to show them off with tiny fresh mozzarella balls and cherry tomatoes, wrapped in large basil leaves.  It turned out that regular toothpicks were a better fit for the individual bites. A drizzle of balsamic reduction finished them off: a Caprese salad on a pick, no fork necessary.
Picture

When composing a menu, I like to make sure there are contrasts in the various menu items such as raw and cooked, familiar and trendy, tart and mild, lean and rich, complex and simple, make-ahead recipe versus last-minute prep. The savory course was almost complete but needed something baked. Individual tarts are always a hit at parties; they are a reliable, compact finger food. I had just tested a recipe for a big tomato tart, which had made a splash at a potluck the week before. I scaled the recipe for individual tarts. The recipe intrigued me for several reasons.  The cooked tomatoes on the top of the tart looked appealingly dry, as opposed to soggy which is what you usually get in tomato tarts. The recipe made good use of the moisture-barrier qualities of a sharp cheddar, blended with mayonnaise. The recipe also recommended salting and draining the tomato slices for half an hour and patting them dry before adding them to the tart. I liked that the flavor profile was not Italian, as we were using the tomato-basil combo in the Caprese bites. Green onions added a little heat and together with sharp cheddar, made a favorite flavor combination. A mixture of multi-colored cherry tomato slices made the little tarts look like jewels, never a bad thing on a buffet table.
Picture
Desserts: the fun part! The hostesses had requested more savories than sweets, but we counted three types of cookies as one cookie tray.  (Baker’s own brand of math.) With cookies, Suzi, Rose, and I all tend to start with the tea classics. The three cookie recipes we chose are all from our website, www.myteaplanner.com. Scottish shortbread is always on our menu. I chose the Lavender Shortbread recipe from The Honey Bee Tea in the Garden menu. Since we were showing off a little bit, I glazed the shortbread fingers with a lemon-based icing and sprinkled a tiny mound of powdered culinary lavender mixed with lavender-hued sparkling sugar. (It’s very easy to go overboard with dried lavender, making cookies taste like soap. Do try to avoid that peril.)
 
Where we diverge is chocolate. When I summarized my potential dessert menu to Rose, she looked horrified and said, “Where’s the chocolate? Ladies will not be happy without chocolate.” She had a valid point and Suzi agreed. My hesitation in putting chocolate on a springtime tea menu is twofold: 1. It’s unkind to white linen napkins, 2. Being brown, it’s not very spring-like. A dilemma. To minimize the messy factor, I decided one of our three cookies could be chocolate. We settled on small chocolate heart cookies, sandwiched with a sour cherry filling, from our February Valentine’s Day Tea menu. Our third cookie utilized Suzi’s decorated cookie background. We used her Vanilla Bean Sugar Cookie dough from our JulyPicnic Tea to make small sugar cookie circles, flooded with buttery yellow royal icing, trimmed with white dots. These little cookies are charming and easily made ahead due to the keeping properties of royal icing which acts as a sealant to the cookies.
 ​
On to the cake portion of the menu. The budget forbade time-consuming petit fours, an elegant tea standard. Instead, Suzi baked lemon cakelets in a Nordicware miniature flower pan and poured pastel glaze over each and garnished with pastel sugar: petite, beautiful, and delicious.  We considered the third dessert next. Rose advocated for more chocolate. I was thinking more along the lines of something cool and creamy, possibly chocolate but not so brown. We wanted an individual dessert that would be pretty and easy to serve. We had tiny, two-ounce footed plastic glasses in mind, with tiny appetizer spoons to match. Grasshopper mousse to the rescue. Both novel and retro, grasshopper cocktails with their combination of two liqueurs, crème de cocoa and crème de menthe, have been in and out of vogue since the 1920’s. As a teenager in the 1970’s, I made grasshopper mousse pie in a chocolate cookie crust, while surreptitiously sipping the bright green, chocolate mint drink. These days, most crème de menthe is not dyed green; both liqueurs are clear. A few drops of green food coloring would tint the mousse to a soft spring green.  What could be prettier?
 ​
Picture
I began looking for a good recipe. I started with a mousse that was gelatin based, as I love combining whipped cream with gelatin and fruit to make something ethereal. Let’s say that this recipe was not that. More like sticky marshmallow melted with toothpaste: ugh. More mousse research revealed that those creations in the 1970’s and 1980’s were made light with both whipped cream and whipped raw egg white. I have no problem with eating raw eggs, but current food safely standards forbid such things. Attempt number two relied on white chocolate for structure. It had a nice texture but the inexpensive white chocolate flavor fought with the mint flavor. Attempt number three used a little cream cheese to bolster the texture. Unfortunately, the slightly sour taste of the cream cheese didn’t work with the mint and the texture was gummy. At this point, I wondered if I should abandon the whole minty problem.  Suzi recommended trying recipe #2 again with Guittard Choc-Au-Lait  chips, which had always worked beautifully for her.  I also added a little more of both liqueurs. Perfect texture, great taste. 
 
On to the garnish. As I had been obsessing about this tiny mousse for several days now, I’d come up with three different garnishes: chocolate cookie crumbs, a variety of fresh mint called “chocolate” mint, featuring green leaves with reddish-brown veins, and Andes mint squares.  I was concerned the cookie crumbs would become soggy so I ruled them out. I had an inspiration to shave the side of the Andes mint square with a vegetable peeler, making the tiniest chocolate brown and green striped curls. I showed the curls to Suzi. She loved them and they became our chosen garnish.
 
Now that the menu was complete, I reviewed for any omissions. There was no fruit—unthinkable. But we didn’t want anything too fussy, and no forks were allowed. The first spring fruit is generally strawberries but the ones I had seen in the market had looked a little tired, green crowns kind of wilted. I asked around at our local markets and found I could order the large-sized, long-stemmed berries usually reserved for dipping. The best of these beautiful, elite strawberries come from Driscoll. They would make a stunning focal point for the buffet table in a clear glass, footed trifle bowl. The menu was now officially complete, with Rose, Suzi, and I all in agreement that this was the spring menu that best fit the occasion.
 
Grasshopper Mousse #2 with Chocolate Pudding Base
 
In the end, I decided to go along with Rose and Suzi’s dictum: more chocolate. I first poured a layer about an inch deep of warm chocolate pudding into each serving cup then chilled the cups on a tray, covered with plastic wrap. The next day, I topped the pudding with mousse, garnishing with Andes mint curls. Begin this recipe several hours or up to 4 days before serving.
 
Pudding base: I box (3.4 ounces) dark chocolate cook and serve pudding mix, not instant
2 cups whole milk or half and half
3 ounces good quality dark chocolate, chopped
 
Mousse: 6 ounces (half a bag) good-quality white chocolate chips, we recommend Guittard Choc-Au-Lait vanilla milk chips
3 tablespoons crème de cocoa
3 tablespoons crème de menthe
1 cup whipping cream, chilled
15 to 18 drops liquid green food color or small dab of gel color
 
Optional garnish(es): shaved Andes mint squares, chocolate cookies or cookie crumbs, mint leaves, whipped cream, chocolate sauce
 
Special equipment: tray large enough to hold individual serving glasses, glass or plastic serving glasses, heavy-bottom saucepan, silicone scraper, plastic wrap, heat-proof medium bowl or 4 cup Pyrex measuring cup, whisk, hand or stand mixer with mixer bowl and beaters, chilled, tablespoon or piping bag and large star tip
 
Makes about 5 1/2 cups

  1. Pudding base: arrange pretty glass or plastic serving glasses on a tray. (Depending on the size chosen, the recipe will make anywhere from 6 large to 18 very small servings.)
  2. In a heavy-bottom saucepan, stir together pudding mix and milk. Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture comes to a full boil.
  3. Remove from heat and stir in chopped chocolate until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth.
  4. Divide among serving glasses. Cover tray with plastic wrap and chill until cold, two hours or up to four days.
  5. Mousse: place white chocolate chips and liqueurs in heatproof bowl. Microwave at 50% power at 30 second intervals, until chips are almost melted, between 1 and 2 minutes total. Whisk until completely melted and mixture is smooth. Set aside for 5 to 10 minutes until slightly cooled.
  6. In chilled mixer bowl, whip chilled cream until stiff peaks form, scraping bowl as needed.
  7. Fold chocolate mixture into whipped cream. Add food color until pale green color is achieved. Cover and chill at lease 3 hours or up to four days.
  8. Assembly: remove tray of pudding bases from fridge. Remove plastic wrap. Divide mousse equally by large spoonfuls or pipe from piping bag fitted with large star tip. Garnish just before serving.  Chill leftovers promptly.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Some random thoughts from Kathleen...

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

    Contact Us
home
free recipes
purchase recipes
Address : 51-349 Kamehameha Highway, Kaaawa, HI 96730

Telephone :  408-379-5200


Copyright © 2015 by Epilogics
  • Home
  • About/Blog
    • Who We Are
    • Our Credentials
    • Tea Travels - Rose's Blog
    • Cakes and Tea - Kathleen's Blog
    • Contact Us
  • The Tea Book
    • The Road Back to Civilization
    • A Brief History of Tea
    • Philosophy of Tea >
      • Harmony
      • Humility
      • Respect
      • Creativity
    • Guidelines for the Host/Hostess >
      • Gathering and Greeting
      • Sharing Stories
      • Sharing Food
      • Sending the Guests Home
    • Guidelines for the Guest >
      • Respect Your Hostess/Host
      • Bring a Gift if You Wish
      • Practice Humility
      • Monitor Your Conversation
      • Arrive with a Grateful Attitude
      • Help if Help is Needed
      • Do Not Criticize
      • Leave Gracefully
      • Send a Thank You Note
    • A Checklist for Planning a Tea Party
    • Teas of the World and How to Make Tea >
      • A Sampling of Teas
      • Herbal Teas and Tisanes
      • How to Make Tea
      • Making Iced Tea
      • Tea Concentrate
      • Brewing Tea for a Crowd
    • Tea Utensils and Accessories >
      • Tea Kettle
      • Tea Pot
      • Tea Cozy
      • Teacups
      • Plates
      • Silverware
      • Teacart
      • Tea Strainer
      • Tea Infuser
      • Three-Tiered Server
      • Cream Pitcher and Sugar Bowl
      • Cake Pedestal
      • Trifle Bowl
      • Jam Pots
      • Serving Dishes, Platters, and Trays
      • Silver Tea Set or Silver Tray
      • Linens
      • Kitchen Equipment for Food Preparation
    • Tea Menu Basics >
      • Sandwiches and Savories
      • Savory Spreads and Dips
      • Scones and Tea Breads >
        • About Lemons
    • Afternoon Tea and the Four Seasons >
      • A Spring Tea
      • An Outdoor Summer Tea
      • An Autumn Afternoon Tea
      • A Winter Afternoon Tea
    • A Calendar of Tea Parties >
      • January: A Japanese New Year’s Tea
      • February: A Valentine’s Day Tea
      • March: A St. Patrick’s Day Irish Tea
      • April: An Easter Tea
      • May: A Mother’s Day Tea
      • June: A Wedding Reception Tea >
        • Lemon Yogurt Wedding Cake
      • July: A Picnic Tea
      • August: A Family Reunion Tea >
        • A North American Family Reunion Tea
        • An Eastern Mediterranean Family Reunion Tea
        • A Kosher Family Reunion Tea
        • A Scandinavian Family Reunion Tea
      • September: An Ozark Farm Harvest Tea
      • October: A Tea to Honor Our Ancestors (Dia de los Muertos)
      • November: A Post Thanksgiving Tea
      • December: A Christmas Tea >
        • In Defense of Fruitcake: Fruitcakes and Candied Fruit
    • A World of Tea Parties >
      • A Chinese Dim Sum Tea
      • A Portuguese Tea
      • A Classic British Afternoon Tea
      • An Indian Chai Party
      • A California Tea
      • A Hawaiian Tea
      • An Italian Tea
      • An American Southern Tea
      • A Russian Tea
      • A French Afternoon Tea
      • A Kosher Tea with Tradional Jewish Foods
    • Afternoon Tea for Special Occasions >
      • An Afternoon Tea for Children
      • A Tea for Our Elders
      • A Honey Bee Tea in the Garden
      • An Urban Tea on the Go
      • Tea for One
      • Afternoon Tea for a Large Group
      • A Vegan Tea
      • A Rose Tea
  • Purchase Recipes
  • Resources
    • Bibliography and Resources
    • Menu and Recipe Index
    • Commercial Food Products
    • Glossary