Time for Tea

The most pleasant thing to do of an afternoon in my opinion is to have afternoon tea. The most important things are lots of tea, scones, clotted cream and plenty of time spent. When I was in Oxford, the best place by far was The Rose, possibly my favourite place in the whole world. They have wonderful leaf teas (my favourite being the vanilla tea) and the scones are seriously the best I've ever tasted. They make them all in the kitchen daily. And, crucially, they serve them warm, with lots of clotted cream and homemade jam.


The picture above isn't actually taken in the Rose, it was a lovely tea room I found on a country walk with my friends Jamie and Jen. They had clotted cream, but the scones weren't amazing. Anyway, I'm sure I'll writing a lot more about The Rose in the future.

What follows is the recipe from The Rose itself, should you be inclined to make your own...

Ingredients
750g organic self raising flour
1tsp baking powder
50g caster sugar
250g unsalted butter
a pinch salt
320-350ml milk
1 egg, whisked to use as egg wash

Sift the flour with baking powder, salt and sugar. Cut the butter into dice, rub the butter into the flour with a very light touch, ensuring your finger never touch the butter, always keep the flour in between. Continue until the mixture looks like coarse breadcrumbs.
Add milk, cut into the mixture with a palette knife a few times to distribute the milk better. Then gather the mass together gently rather than kneading. Roll out onto a floured tabletop to a thickness of 2½cm. Stamp out with a scone cutter. Place on a baking tray and brush the top with egg wash. Bake for 20min at 180-190°C.

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