Afternoon Tea Party

Hey y'all, I'm Paula Deen, and today we're going to put a twist on an afternoon tea party

that's going to turn this southern tradition into a dining delight. You know, if you thought wine was the only beverage to pair with food

you've just got to come with me to the Savannah Tea Room, where we're going to learn a thing or two about pairing for teetotalers

And then it's back to my kitchen where I'm preparing some of my favorite finger foods

And the first one is going to be my specialty pickled okra sandwiches that are truly one recipe you're just going to have to try

And then it's my pesto cheese blossom that's the perfect topping for any cracker

And finally, it's my cherry cream cheese tarts that are melt-in-your-mouth delicious

So y'all take out your best china and get the water boiling, because right now it's tea time

Today I'm having a new video

a very special tea party for a group of friends. Now the kind of tea that I want to serve to them

today, you can't buy from the grocery store. I want to get them a nice, special, loose tea

And I can only find that at the Savannah Tea Room because I want it to be very, very special

And I hope you'll come along with me because one day you may want to throw your own tea party

What are y'all doing here? Hey, Mom. We're just over at the new restaurant

Aren't y'all supposed to be working? Oh, we were, uh... Hey! Just went by to check on progress, and we're having some tea

What are you doing here? I wasn't expecting to see y'all. Well, we weren't expecting to see you. Ooh, what y'all drinking

Okay. Mmm. Oh, my goodness. And what y'all eating? These are some delicious poppy seed cakes that they got here in time

Delicious. I'm getting ready to have the girls over for a tea party. Beautiful

So Elizabeth's supposed to have some tea ready for me. Okay. So y'all on your way back to the restaurant

Yeah, we're headed back that way shortly. I ain't going back to the restaurant. Yeah

I'm going to the golf course. I'm with you. Hey Elizabeth. Hey Paula, how are you

I'm fine, how are you? I was surprised to see those Dean brothers out there having tea

I know. They're having a good time. Yeah, they are. Well, do you have me ready

How many people are you going to have? I think I'm having like six. All right

The actual tea you're doing is the green tea. It's sentia. It's puchon, peach, rose, and cherry

Oh, let me smell. So that should go really nicely with your cakes and things. Oh, gosh

It smells just heavenly, doesn't it? Yeah, it could almost be appropriate

And it almost looks like a potpourri with all the colors in it

I have everything you need and what you need to know to get it going right. Okay, great

And you got my tea ball and everything. Your tea ball, the scoop, the tiki. That sounds wonderful

I thank you so much. Thank you. And I'll see you before too long. Sounds good

Thanks, Elizabeth. Have a good one. Bye. Bye. Okay, guys, I got my stuff

You got everything you needed? Yes. Give Mommy a kiss. Love you

Love you. I love you, too. Catch you a little bit later. Y'all have fun. I love you, too

Oh, we're gonna have a wonderful time. I got lipstick all over you. That's all right. All right, now, y'all going back to work, aren't you

Right now. You're going back to work. We are. We're headed that way. Okay. All right

See ya. Well, y'all take care of the restaurant. Bye-bye. Let's make our tea time

2.30. Let's go. How did y'all like Savannah Tea Room

Isn't it a beautiful little store? It actually brought back so many memories for me

I remember as a girl my mother making tea out of the loose tea leaves using the little tea bags

and she made absolutely the best sweet tea I ever tasted. So I hope y'all enjoyed our visit

All right, now how many of y'all have had an okra sandwich? Probably not many of you

The South really loves your okra. We love it fried, we love it boiled, and we even love it pickled

Now, to assemble these sandwiches, it's so simple. We have just taken a piece of ordinary white bread

We have decrusted it. And we're going to take our rolling pin and just roll them out real flat like that

And you want to take your bread and flip it over and turn it the other way so that you get all the edges down Now at this point all we gonna do is take cream cheese and spread a light little layer over that entire piece of bread

And you might have to dig through the okra to find long enough pieces

I've found a nice piece in there, and I'm just going to roll that up

Just like that. And we'll do that one more time. Do the same thing with that

Now we're going to put one more light coating on the outside of cream cheese

because we're going to sprinkle this with fresh parsley. You know that fresh parsley wouldn't stick to the dry bread

So we've got to have something to make that parsley stick. Well, that sounds like a good excuse to me to eat a little bit more cream cheese

So I've got some fresh parsley. It's already been chopped and we're just gonna sprinkle it

Now you could use dried, but I wouldn't recommend that. I really like the fresh parsley for these

Now when I plate these up, I wanna show you how I plate them

They're really pretty this way, but I really like to cut them at an angle

and put them on the platter so that you can see the inside of the okras. And what a pretty little finger sandwich that is

They're so good. So delicious. I think your guests will love the unusualness of the flavors and the beauty of the little sandwich

Y'all don't go too far. Coming up next, the pesto cheese blossom

I'd like to share with y'all now the pesto cheese blossom. We're going to start over here with just an ordinary glass bowl

that's been wrapped in saran wrap inside of the bowl. So we're going to start with one round cheese in the bottom

and then we're going to come up here, and we're going to let it overlap onto that bottom ring of cheese

And you see how it's already taken the shape of a flower blossom

And then I'm going to save these three slices to put on the top of our filling

Now the first layer that we're going to put in there will be cream cheese

And we're going to start by dropping a whole garlic clove into there

And then we're going to add a few pistachio nuts. And then we're going to add two eight-ounce packages of cream cheese

You can see where all the pistachios and the garlic was just kind of slinging everywhere

We don't want to miss a bit of that flavor. We want to get every drop

Now we're just going to take that out of the bucket. We're actually fixing to make our pesto next

To make our pesto, we're going to use about a half a cup of fresh parsley and about a

half a cup of fresh basil. This looks so, so pretty, doesn't it? All right, we're

going to put in about a half a cup of pine nuts, a clove of garlic, oh about a

fourth of a teaspoon of salt, and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil

And we're going to just let that come almost like a paste

I'll go ahead and add a little black pepper to it. I love the cracked black pepper

And you can just do this to taste. Now, I like quite a little bit of pepper in mine

And I'm going to add just another little drop of oil while it's running

And that should do it. We've got one final layer to complete our blossom

The last layer to our pesto cheese blossom is going to be sun-dried tomatoes

Now, we're just going to put those in the Cuisinart. And I'm gonna add just a little bit of the oil

that was on the tomatoes back into them as they're pureeing. Oh, I love sun-dried tomatoes, too

I just adore those. All we got to do now is just put our cheese blossom together I gonna leave that right that right in there because this is actually going to be our next to the last layer So I just going to put that right there and let it sit

The first layer we're going to put in is the cream cheese with the pistachios

And we're going to put about a third of that. And that's going to go in first, and we're just going to spread it

on the bottom of our bowl, just like that. And you can see it's already got the makings of a flower

Looks like a blossom. The next layer is our pesto. Now I think every time I've made this dish

I've probably layered it together a little differently. So you can do it any way you want to

I've got the first layer of cream cheese, half the pesto. I'm going back with another layer of cream cheese

Just spread that out, just like if you were frosting a cake

and I'm going to go back with the rest of the pesto

All right, and then another thin, thin layer of cream cheese. Looks so good

All right, now I'm going to come in here with our sun-dried tomatoes

And that red, when we slice it, that red is going to be so pretty coming through there

All right, now we're going to finish up with the last little bit of cream cheese

Looks so pretty and so festive. So before we seal this up, I'm going to take these last few slices of cheese and put them around like so

And then I'm going to pull the paper up so it'll form it into more of a ball

and then I'm going to just tie him up with a twist tie

put him back in the bowl, and put him in the refrigerator until he's set

Like I said, this is a great dish to do the day before. Which is what I've done

I have one that I made yesterday, and you can see how nice and firm it is

You can see the sun-dried tomatoes have kind of run out. I have a few crackers to go along with it

And this really doesn't need a lot of garnish. Maybe just a little basil, and you're actually ready to go

And what do you say we taste? Now, I like to cut mine like a pie

Since it's in a round circle. Okay, here we go. Look how pretty that looks

And you can serve this with any type of cracker that you want, but you want to make sure

you got a good premium cracker. It's so good and so savory

The tomatoes make it taste like A wonderful, rich Italian dish. It's just out of this world

It's over the top. I think you'll love it. Plus, it's pretty

Y'all stick around. Go fix your glass of tea because we're fixing to make cherry cheesecake tart

I'd like to share with y'all now a simple little recipe that I was formulating the other night in the kitchen

So simple, so quick, and so easy, yet so delicious. And we're going to take two eight-ounce packages of cream cheese and about a cup of sugar

Now, this is a half a cup measure, so we'll do that twice

And we're just going to cream that together. Then I'm going to add one egg at the time

And I'm going to put in about a teaspoon of vanilla. This is one of those quick, quick, easy desserts that you can have ready for your family in

just a matter of a few minutes. And they'll just love it, and it stores well

You can keep them and actually run them a couple of nights for dessert

All right, now I'm going to transfer this to a measuring cup so we won't make a mess

on our muffin tin pan because sometimes I get a little sloppy when I'm using a spoon

Now the crust is wonderful that we're going to make for these with just absolutely no work

We're going to take an ordinary vanilla wafer. We're gonna drop that into our muffin tin

and we're gonna put the flat side down. Then we're gonna take our batter

and fill that muffin tin almost completely full We gonna leave about a quarter of an inch topping This is one of those desserts that the kids will wanna come in and help with because it so simple

Now we're fixing to run this into a preheated oven that has been heated to 350 degrees

and we're gonna let them cook about 15 to 18 minutes. In the meantime, I've got a pan over here

that's been cooking. And the time is actually up on these. Look how pretty these look

Now I want to tell you something about the day I was formulating these and playing around with them

I took them out of the oven and I said, oh, they're so pretty

And I went to my pantry to get a can of cherry pie filling out

And I opened it and I turned back around and I said

What happened to them? They look like this. And I said, oh, my goodness

And then I realized it was just perfect for what I wanted to do with it

because they all fell in the center, and the cherry filling fits just perfectly down in that little hole

I thought I had made a big goof, and it turned out to be just perfect

They look just wonderful, and it's just the right amount because, you know, cream cheese or cheesecakes

can really, really be rather rich. So this is a perfect size

Now I'm going to serve these right in the paper, but when the girls get ready to eat them

they can very easily just slip them right out of their paper. And look at the nice little crust that the vanilla wafer made

from Aide with absolutely no trouble. And you can see the pan that I took out of the oven has already fallen

Mm-hmm. They are so incredibly out of this world. Y'all stick around because I'm going to give you a few quick tips

to help you along at your tea party. I want to share a few tips with you on tea time

I want to show you what an ordinary grocery store flavored tea looks like

as opposed to what I'm going to be using today for our tea party

You can see how finely ground that is, and you're not really sure what you're getting

as opposed to what I've picked up from the tea shop. Look at the beautiful tea leaves and all the different aromas that's in it

To brew a pot of tea, I'm going to simply put one teaspoon of tea leaves for each cup of tea that I'm going to brew

Just snap that shut, and I'm putting it into a teapot that's filled with hot water that's been poured in right before boil

I'm going to let that steep for about one to three minutes, and already the aromas are just about to knock me over

They're so wonderful. Now, you can serve this tea cold as well as hot

And in order to sweeten your tea, you can have a simple syrup on hand, which is equal

parts sugar, equal parts water, brought to a boil and make a simple syrup that'll hang around

Just pour your tea over your ice and sweeten each glass individually

Now our tea should be ready. And you can see the beautiful color of our tea

Now we have several different choices on how we can sweeten our tea

We can use a regular sugar, we can use a syrup, or we can use honey

Or if you want to throw in a nice little twist, you can use sweetened orange rinds or pineapple

or just a plain sprig of orange zest or lemon zest. And mint is always appropriate in your hot tea

I think I'm going for the orange today. and I hope that you'll take the time to treat yourself to a nice cup of hot fresh brewed tea

I can hardly wait for the girls to get here and sample some of the things that I've made for them

today. The cherry cream cheese tarts and the pickled okra sandwiches and the pesto cheese

blossoms and of course that very special tea that I went and bought for them. I hope that I've given

you some good ideas for a tea party that you're going to throw. And until next time, America

I wish you best dishes and love from my tea party to yours