The book club I am in (six years strong, ya'll!) has never done a cookbook for our book club, so in March we passed around a few copies of A Literary Tea Party and everyone made a different recipe for our gathering. Of course A Literary Tea Party was the perfect choice for book club, and the recipes within are just as good. At first I figured it would just be a bunch of sweets, like a pastry shop in book form, but there are plenty of savory recipes too.
I also like that this book has a mix of recipes from very simple to a bit more complex, to cater to anyone's cooking abilities, and to challenge people a bit too in a friendly way. There are also really delicious tea combinations in the back of the book, including the Drink Me tea, my new favorite, but more on that later.
At our gathering, we had Sword in the Stone cheese bites, lavender lemon eclairs, hot cross currant buns, bread and butterflies (pictured just below), sweet potato bacon pastries, honey nut banana bread, star-crossed focaccia with Parmesan chive butter, cyclone cookies, dark chocolate earl grey lavender truffles, and several other things I can't even remember at this point. Suffice to say, it was one of my favorite book clubs.
Afterwards, I borrowed the book and made some additional items at home to get a better feel for the book since passing it around didn't leave much time to browse.
The Badger's Set salad bites took me into a new realm of trying dandelion greens for the first time. They are interesting though I would prefer to mix them into a larger set of greens instead of eating straight up dandelion greens. They are actually pretty good for you, with a ton of vitamin K.
Being a few weeks before Easter (at the time), I couldn't resist the Cracked China deviled eggs. They looked pretty cool in a potato salad after the fact.
And as I previously mentioned, the Drink Me tea is my favorite. Our book club hostess this go round made a pitcher of it and it was all I could do not to drink it all. I went home and ordered peony tea and pear tea on Amazon so I could make my own, and have made a quart every week since. Another thing I re-made from book club was the sword in the stone cheese bites because I love cheese, especially Camembert.
In short, order this book, make your book club read it and each person bring a recipe from the book. If you don't have a book club, make or join one, and them have them read it and each person bring a recipe from this book. Or just take the easy route and read it yourself and have a leisurely tea party on your own timeframe. The only drawback of this books is that it made me realize just how few literary classics I've really ever read. Maybe that's the next theme for book club, unread literary classics.
What is a classic book that everyone else but you seems to have read?
