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Although fall is my favorite season for inviting friends over for an autumnal afternoon tea party, this cool season tends to get quickly filled with invitations and activities. This fall, we are hosting the first annual “Biscuit Off!” competition in which invitees will compare their biscuits and biscuit creations against other entrants. Biscuits and their close relative the scone have long held a special place in our hearts and on our tables. Those of us with Southern roots have experienced great biscuits first hand from grandma’s kitchen or have heard tales of the daily mountains of biscuits cooks made for the family and field hands. If one is described as having ‘a good biscuit hand,’ it is high praise indeed. Visiting various breakfast places while traveling to sample different versions of biscuits and gravy is a time-honored activity in the Murdock family and always a great excuse to go out to breakfast any ole time.While waiting for the seemingly endless Northern California summer to end, I muse on the menu for my afternoon tea party. My starting place is our Autumn Tea menu, here: myteaplanner.com But fall flavors are so alluring that I have to keep recombining them in even more delicious new ways. Can I pack more pumpkin in somehow? Can I use ginger or mace in a different way? Can I finally put poached pears in there somewhere? And is there enough maple?! These burning autumn questions swirl together as I create a menu for my fall tea party. I love to tinker and adjust until I’m happy with the result. Ta-da!
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​Perfect, tasty, and so very fall, but unfortunately, the fall tea party hasn’t yet found a place on the schedule. Not to be deterred from celebrating my new menu, I reasoned the next best thing to actually cooking it is to create it in watercolor. I started doing daily watercolor paintings early in the year and have been enjoying reproducing tea foods, still life, and flowers in an effort to improve my painting and illustration.
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​Several autumns ago, we invested in these vintage little brown ceramic custard cups. They are just so charming. Each autumn since, I have delighted in digging them out of storage and using them on my fall table. Here one is holding gingered honey butter to accompany maple pecan scones. The illustration makes them look like chocolate chips in the scones instead of pecans, but I love how the glaze on the brown cup looks. For the flavored butter, I might beat softened butter with honey and freshly grated ginger, which would make a tangy spread for the warm scones.
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I can’t get enough beet pickled eggs! I’ll use any pretext to put them on a menu. The color is so wonderfully vibrant and the taste is zippy from my home-pickled beets, made with fresh dill and garlic. Popular microgreen mixtures combine sprouts of kale, arugula, endive, radish, and or beet greens. They would make a pretty and complementary bed for the deviled eggs.
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I recently made mushroom soup when we were gifted with an abundance of sliced mushrooms. That week, we had mushroom scramble, mushrooms in salad, mushroom pâté, and we’d barely made a dent in our mushroom trove. I figured mushroom soup would use up the most mushrooms, so I dove in. I’d forgotten how delicious this creamy, earthy soup can be. I added the tiniest bit of cream to lend it the most velvety finish. You’ll recognize my favorite vintage custard cup attractively holding the soup. For the savory hand pies, a filling could be any of several different flavors. At myteaplanner.com, we have recipes for potato pasties and mushroom piroshki, either of which would do nicely. A spicy ground beef or minced root vegetable filling would also be yummy.
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​I saw a summer grilling recipe for biscuit dough wrapped around skewers made of rosemary sprigs. Suzi and I loved the idea and made them at a 4th of July barbeque where they were a big hit. For fall, I’d like to add a strip of bacon to the strip of biscuit dough which gets wound around the skewers. Everything is better with bacon, right?
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Every autumn I say to myself that I will make something in those cute little miniature pumpkins but every year I seem not to. But wouldn’t it be charming for each guest to have their own baked pumpkin filled with a warm mix of diced root vegetables and big pearls of Israeli couscous? Or pumpkin au gratin or pumpkin stew?
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Wait a second! Suzi just informed me that we made pumpkin soup and served it in the miniature pumpkins several years ago. Oops, forget I mentioned it.
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​Eclairs are one of the French pastries that are worth the investment in some practice time. Once mastered, choux pastry opens up so many possibilities for sweet as well as savory applications. Filled with ice cream, pastry cream, or lemon curd, they make decadent desserts. Filled with chicken or lobster salad, they make elegant tea sandwiches. A petite éclair of only four inches long would be an exquisite addition to the tea table. This fall I was working on a caramel icing recipe for a wedding cake, and I realized it would make a fantastic topper for éclairs. I’m planning to share that whole wedding cake recipe, including the caramel, in a future blog. If you need the caramel recipe sooner, email me and I will get it to you.
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​I admit that I have a fondness for pinwheel cookies. Any excuse is good enough to make some of these traditional rolled-up ice box cookies. I love the red and white colored dough versions at Christmas and the poppy seed filled vanilla versions. Here, I’m thinking of taking vanilla dough and spicy gingerbread dough and rolling them up together to form a brown and ivory pinwheel cookie. They would look quite nice with a maple sugar cookie cuddled up next to a cup of tea.
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​These individual pies can be made in canning jar lids or four inch tart pans. Being shallower than the usual pumpkin pie, lattice should work in this petite pie. Lattice will definitely work with apple pie filling. I wouldn’t rule out pecan pie filling, either, and how mouth-watering would that be?!
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​This was the year I actually made poached pears and baked them into gingerbread cupcakes: hurrah for me! However, I learned several things about working with pears. When the nice farmer at the farmer’s market tells you to wait for the pears to ripen up, do listen to her. No amount of cooking will get the unripe pears past that undesirable gritty texture. Do use the whole bottle of port or red wine for the best color in the poaching liquid. Don’t be tempted to use half an old bottle of Martinelli’s apple juice as filler; your pears might turn out to be an anemic dusty mauve color. When filling the cupcake wells with batter, do listen to that inner voice that reminds you that your gingerbread recipe, though extremely delicious, rises really high, so DON’T OVERFILL THOSE CUPS! When a whole small poached pear is inserted into each cup, the batter will overflow all over the oven and make quite a mess. Scraping burnt mess off the oven floor is something I strive not to do. If I hadn’t had to clean the oven, if I hadn’t lost power for three days, if I hadn’t gotten a head cold right afterwards, I MAY have gotten more tiny pears, more port, more molasses and started over. Or maybe not. I did have some of the yummy caramel icing leftover from my cake experiment, and I did put a spoon of it over the pear, and it was delicious.
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I’d seen this crafty candle on Pinterest and took note because my hunter had gifted me with these exact feathers. The pin said they are guinea fowl feathers available at craft stores. I thought they were quail feathers, but he said they are from wood ducks. They also caught my eye because I had each element already on hand in the studio. It is simply a small glass votive wrapped in the kind of dried corn husks used to make tamales, tied with raffia or twine, finished with that pretty little feather. Each thing in stock: that never happens. It must be the magic of autumn.