Sconewiches

I'm co-hosting a bridal shower in six weeks, and we're self-catering.  There are three of us preparing for the thing, and I'm really excited.  First for the shower itself, because it will be lovely and I think the bride will feel very special, and second for extremely selfish reasons: I'm in charge of the food and this is a capital-P Project.  And you know I love anything overly complicated in the kitchen.

Guest list: 20-25
Venue: NYC apartment
Theme: Afternoon tea

I've never done tea before.  I think I've *been* to tea twice: once at the Plaza, as a middle schooler, and once at the Washington Duke in college, because my roommate and I had food points to burn.  By cribbing from menus around town, I've gathered that scones and tea sandwiches are a must, with a lot of little treats and cookies with them.  Little treats and cookies I can do in my sleep: chocolate shortbread, regular shortbread, cake truffles, perhaps some almond cookies, and little cupcakes from the store (I am so over cupcakes.  I think everyone is.  I actually felt guilty over New Year's, when my cake truffles were attacked by party guests, who ignored the cupcakes another girl made until someone grabbed one and stuffed it down out of guilt).  Things that freeze well.  I am not a huge scone person, but every recipe for them looks simple as hell, and after a test batch or two I'm confident I can blitz up a batch and freeze them en masse.  That leaves the sandwiches.

Oh, tea sandwiches.  Is anything more emblematic of the blandness, the thoughtlessness, the pointlessness of English food?  Do you Brits understand why we Americans don't listen to European criticism towards our lack of a national cuisine?  Perhaps it's because you've had WAY LONGER to get it together, and the best you can do is BUTTERED BREAD WITH CUCUMBER????  (Apologies to Heston Blumenthal and Marco Pierre White.  But I'm not totally wrong here).  Also... the beverage itself.  Tea.  Ugh.

But this is good, because it is a challenge, and it is only by forcing our will to adapt that we grow as people.  I am going to figure out how to make the best goddamn tea sandwiches out there.  I'd like to say that I started by visiting various high-end New York bakeries and tea shops, quizzing master bread bakers and native Brits, but I really started with a line from Diana Wynne Jones's YA novel, Charmed Life: "There were paper-thin cucumber sandwiches and big squashy eclairs."  It told me what I already knew: it's all about the bread.  No one, particularly not the carb-conscious whippets invited to this thing, wants to eat thick a thick bread sandwich with minimal fillings.  The bread will have to be cut super-thin to jive with the translucently sliced cucumber/light smear of cream cheese/single slice of turkey etc.  The whole sandwich is essentially shrunk to scale.  Eureka!

I'm not sure where or how to get this magical thin-sliced bread, but for now I have a test batch of Momofuku Milk Bar's Mustard Butter Brioche in the oven, and it smells amazing.

Hrm

I had a slightly disturbing thought over the weekend, as I was walking around in jeans and a t-shirt that both fit fine on their own but created a little bit of muffin-top together: what if I didn't pull my sweater over my tummy? What if I just walked around and let other people observe the fact that I do not have rock hard abs?  Is this what it's like to be a dude?  And I realized that huh, yes, that is what it's like to be a dude.  Dudes still tuck their shirts after bingeing on carbs.  Because dudes don't care.  And the fact that this was such a thundercrash moment was so depressing.

(The weekend was really fun, though!  Dan and I hung out with friends and family, took in top-quality entertainment, and spent quality time together on the couch, reading the paper and admiring the cats.  Hard to beat, muffin tops be damned).

(Also, upon reflection, part of the Depressing Thought mentioned above stemmed from watching Tiny Furniture on Friday, which was quite boring for long stretches while teetering on being great.  I liked that the movie was simultaneously narcissistic and brutal: the writer/star, Lena Dunham, made a movie about, essentially, herself, but she didn't go on a juice cleanse before filming (like I would), or attempt to cut around her slightly chubby thighs.  No guy reveals his long-suffering feelings for her character at the movie's end.  She doesn't get her dream job, or even figure out what the dream job is.  She just mopes around and makes a variety of small, selfish, and/or self-destructive choices, and then the movie's over.  The details of post-graduate funk, however, are dead-on, and I could feel that 23-year-old confusion of graduating in the 2000s with a degree in liberal arts: so now what?  In any case, I recommend the movie, but keep your expectations low.  It's more interesting to think about than to watch).

She has a show on HBO coming out in April, too, which seems like it will be a more entertaining exploration of similar themes.