Afternoon Tea

I love any excuse to have friends over and to use my flying turkey dishes, and a Saturday afternoon tea seemed to achieve both ends. It was a gorgeous day, with plenty of warm sunlight streaming through my living room windows. Since Halloween was just around the corner, I used my existing Halloween decor to complement a menu inspired by fall flavors.

The table all set for tea. You can see the gorgeous sunlight pouring through the windows, warming the entire room!

I hand-wrote invitations, using stationery from a supply that overflows a drawer of my console. (I'm very guilty of always buying stationery and never actually writing anything by hand.) I rummaged through my hutch and cabinets to find all the serving pieces I would need to make a pretty tabletop display, so no special purchases needed. 

The Menu: 

• Pound cake with vanilla honey butter and pumpkin butter
• Ginger-molasses cookies
• Cinnamon-chip scones with maple glaze
• Pumpkin mini-cupcakes with cream cheese frosting
• Pumpkin blondies with caramel filling (find the recipe at Tasty Kitchen)

Of course, a tea party is not a tea party without tea. Aveda's Comfort Tea is a fantastic brew for the tea-averse. It's naturally sweet with a hint of peppermint, and therefore doesn't require sugar or milk. Another pantry staple is Earl Grey; a traditional black tea whose flavors work beautifully with the spicy sweetness of the tea treats. To change things up, I also brewed a batch of my Southern sweet iced tea, using Tazo Wild Sweet Orange tea as the base. 

To make space for teacups, saucers, stemware, and the teas, I pressed my living room console table into service. I covered the potholders used to protect the surface of the console from heat with a square of black velveteen used in my Halloween decor. It's probably a little un-chic to use silver teakettles and not teapots for service, but the silver finish of the kettles did work well with my silver mercury-glass votives, candlesticks, and painted pumpkins!