German Pancakes: Take Two

For last week's Art Appreciation Tea Party I tried again to do the pancake fruit cups/German Pancakes that facebook used perfect pictures of to taunt me. I found the original recipe: check! No cheap shortcuts. I followed the instructions: check! Well, at least, I thought I had, but apparently using Pam on the muffin tins wasn't the same as "grease well." And the result?

 Hmmmm. Still better than the peaks I had the week before, right?


Maybe my problem was unrealistic expectations? See, the original picture does not look like any other German Pancake recipe picture out there. Also, the original poster only shows one  pancake, already filled in. So you really don't get a good idea of what they look like before you add in a filling. (Here is the recipe link.)

This is what mine looked like before filling, after sprinkling on the powdered sugar. If you want it to look nice, use a sifter. I don't own a sifter.

Taste-wise, I liked them. They reminder me a lot of my maternal grandmother's "Pop-overs" that we would beg her to make every time she visited and stayed with us when I was a kid. The orange-peach-mango fruit spread we put in some for Builder Boy (my 7 year old foodie) was pretty good, but the strawberry jelly ones for Early Bird were a bit too much for me. Also, if you're making these for tea, you really don't need more than two per person. Add in the fact that we also had Turkish Delight and it was too much sweets for me for a tea. Even Early Bird did not eat very many.

Filled.

I found the Turkish Delight at Ross last week. I was out and about trying to find a new skirt (no luck) and I found these! I had never had them before, and had no idea what to expect. But Builder Boy and I have been reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe together, and so I had to buy it when I found it. Principal Daddy described them as "soft fruit snacks or early gummy bears," but I thought they were much nicer than how he described them. If you ever find these in a store, I recommend trying them at least once.

With these very sweet things we also had sandwiches with our tea. I wanted to try watercress sandwiches, but it took time to find a supplier, and when I finally did, they were all out. Maybe this week?

So then, I decided to make egg salad sandwiches. But that morning we ended up eating several eggs for breakfast, and the German Pancakes require six eggs. So I did not have enough eggs left to make sandwiches. Next go to was tuna; it wasn't until after I had opened the can that I realized I was out of mayonnaise. (This......happens a lot to me when cooking....) So I mixed the tuna with some ranch and some wasabi horseradish sauce. Probably not very English High Tea, but very yummy!

I am going to say something now on the cutting of tea sandwiches. If you already know all this, feel free to skip ahead to the end. But this is something that I had to figure out the hard way.

Wrong way.

The first time I tried cutting tea sandwiches into four triangles, I cut the bread in an "X" shape. Or, to describe it another way, I cut it diagonally into two triangle halves, and then cut those triangles into half triangles again. Because my bread was rectangular and not a perfect square, this is what I ended up with.

Not matching, and not as pretty.

Through trial and error, and several less than ideal looking sandwiches (I practiced on lunch pb&j) I found the best way to get uniform triangles from my rectangular bread.

Step 1: Cut off crusts into rectangle shape.

Step 2: Cut in two rectangle halves.

Step 3: Cut retangles diagonally into right angle triangles.

Step 4 (Optional): Arrange into star pattern on serving plate.





Concerning the art portion of our tea, I printed out two of Van Gogh's most famous  paintings that I found at VanGoghGallary.com.
I tried to talk about his use of color and how his work was not appreciated in his time. They were more interested in the commercial aspect of painting, specifically how much money his paintings were worth. Though they did enjoy looking at the pictures. They also asked to listen to the orchestra music from last week, so I obliged them.

I had intended to bring up the concept of "small talk" and what is polite and what is not polite to talk about at a tea party, but we didn't get to it. Maybe this week.

Also this week a friend on facebook shared a link to some free tea party printables shared by Homeschool Giveaways.

And if you're interested in more elaborate tea parties, I have a Pinterest board with some more ideas.

Follow Mrs.'s board Visions of Tea Parties on Pinterest.




This week: poetry!

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