Food Club January

Six women, three babies (two in-utero, one newly born), lots of tea: my cooking club did high tea this afternoon. Well, we say cooking club, but what we spend most time doing when we get together is eat. Perhaps we should call ourselves Food Club and be done with it. Anyway, that’s all semantics, while you’re really here for the food. So, without further ado, the menu:

Cookies with white and blue sprinkles
Scones with clotted cream and berry jam
Puff pastry with tomato/leek/bacon or cheese/onion filling
Sandwiches with goat’s cheese/sun dried tomatoes/ walnuts/honey and wraps with smoked chicken/avocado and lettuce
New York style cheese cake
White chocolate oatmeal cookies and chocolate-peppermint bark

Tea and conversation both flowed liberally and before I knew it, it was six-thirty and I felt one-bite-too-full with delicious food. In other words: a pretty darn good Saturday afternoon. And, even though there was no cooking when we were together, I did learn a great new trick from Hanneke: making "clotted cream".

Clotted cream is not something that you can buy easily here. And if you do come across it, it is priced as though it could be a girl's best friend. This is all quite unfortunate, as scones and clotted cream make such a lovely pairing. It turns out, though, that you can create something remarkably similar from ingredients for sale at every supermarket. It is a little less delicately sweet, but the texture and consistency come seriously close. What you do is mix three tablespoons of sour cream (full fat, please) with one tub of mascarpone (250 gr) and presto: clotted cream a la Hanneke. If you can then get her to bake her buttermilk scones for you, and her mom to cook up a batch of jam, you're in for a serious treat.