Tea party ideas, tips and more…

Isabeau spread homemade violet jelly in between the glazed layers of vanilla bean and bergamot flavored yellow cake. Violet jelly??? Why is it green? The doll’s homemade violet jelly is green because they don’t add the lemon juice that most violet jelly recipes call for. The lemon juice causes and lovely chemical reaction between the steeped violet flowers and the acid in the lemon juice which turns the color from pale green to lavender. All of the little cloth sisters have most discerning taste buds and feel that the lemon juice overpowers the lovely delicate taste of the violets, so they choose to omit the lemon juice and have spring green jelly instead.

The tiny three tiered cakes are a nod back to the 2nd Izannah Walker birthday celebration here at http://www.izannahwalker.com in 2011. The original cake shown above in the far left image was decorated with borage flowers, so using herbs & flowers is one of our long running traditions.

If you are suddenly curious about what type of cake Isabeau baked for the 2011 birthday cake it was a very old receipt (yes, so old that it was called a receipt rather than a recipe) for Pound Cake.

 Pound Cake

Beat one Cup of Butter to a Cream, slowly beat in one and one third Cups of Sugar.  Add one Teaspoonful of Mace and beat in five whole Eggs, adding them one at a time.  Sift in two Cups of Flour, turn at once into a greased and floured Pan or Mould and bake slowly for one Hour.*

*Isabeau baked her cakes in a 300 degree oven, 30 minutes for the doll size cakes and two hours for the larger people size version.

All of this looking back at the 2011 birthday cake has convinced Sarah Alice that now you are going to be dying of curiosity and want to know the receipt/recipe for the very 1st birthday dessert that the dolls baked in 2010. P.S. Please pretend that you are, even if you aren’t, just to make her happy.

 Birth-day Pudding

Butter a deep dish, and lay in slices of bread and butter, wet with milk, and upon these sliced tart apples, sweetened and spiced.   Then lay on another layer of bread and butter and apples, and continue thus till the dish is filled.  Let the top layer be bread and butter, and dip it in milk, turning the buttered side down.  Any other kind of fruit will answer as well.  Put a plate on the top, and bake two hours, then take it off and bake another hour.

This receipt (aka recipe) is from Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book by Catherine E. Beecher.  Catherine Esther Beecher was born in 1800 in East Hampton, Long Island.  She founded the Hartford Female Seminary in 1823 as well as other schools for young women in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin.  She wrote A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book (1846).

Notes:

After buttering my dishes I dusted them with sugar, before layering in the bread and butter.

I cut the crusts off my bread, as the pudding was for a special occasion, but you certainly don’t have to.  I saved the crusts as a treat for the wild birds in my yard.  You may also save them to make  stuffings, bread crumbs, or croutons.

I chose cinnamon, mace and nutmeg as my spices.

I baked my doll sized pudding in a custard cup, which would also be nice if you want to bake yours in individual portions.

I preheated my oven to 350 degrees and baked my puddings for 15 minutes, then I reduced the oven temperature to 250 degrees and continued baking for the remaining 2 hours and 45 minutes.  I removed my doll size pudding from the oven after 30 minutes of total baking time.  Your baking time is going to depend a lot on the size of your dishes and the thickness of your pudding, so check your oven fairly frequently.  It’s also a good idea to put a cookie sheet under your dish, because my pudding bubbled over as it was baking.

“What are those little green crumbs that are showing up everywhere in the photos?” The green cake crumbs are supposed to represent moss, and were made by adding green food coloring to just enough cake batter to fill a single cupcake in a cupcake pan. After the cupcake baked and cooled Sarah Alice crumbled it to bits! Which she laughingly admits is one of her favorite baking chores.

shhhh… Both Sarah Alice and Isabeau sometimes help me post stories from here at the doll’s house on Facebook and Instagram. Afterwards they have been known to do a little late night scrolling for baking ideas… They found the idea for cake crumb moss from mustloveherbs . (and obviously the internet is their most well guarded secret tip!)