A Week of Cooking

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With a blistering cold outside, it was very nice to work on indoor chores this week. Most of this time was spent cooking and baking! However, unlike most families our purpose went well beyond the needs of our family dinner. Having a Tea Room means that we are constantly looking for the right menu. Implementing our policy of using local seasonal produce also imposes some important restrictions.

So the week for us was all about experimenting with new and old recipes to highlight both local products and our own farm produce. This went from the creation of new pastries to main dishes.

We started with our scones. We went as far as making a Kiwi raisin scone (of course using our own Kiwi berries which have been transformed into Kiwi raisins).

Kiwi raisin scones

We went on to rework our Madeleine recipe making them Almond flavoured instead of Lemon.

Almond flavoured Madeleines

We even started to rework our Lavender shortbread. Although a classic high tea sweet, some people do not enjoy such strong Lavender flavour. We toyed with this one quite a lot and we think we came up with the ideal solution. We had to have Lavender (we have so much of it on the farm now), but we broke it up a bit with a new flavour and created a French country-style shortbread.

French country-style Lavender shortbread

We're even considering new additions to our pastry, including profiteroles based on the classic French "Pate a Choux". Working with these and our own version of a pastry cream has proven to be a fattening experience!

These are simply "scrumptious"

Experimenting with our main menu items means that we have focussed on our pasta making techniques. We've created some home made noodles that are very versatile....although we did have to improvise when some of these proved extremely long.

Playing with home made pasta.

All in all, it has been a worthwhile week of experimentation...and eating! As we perfect our work we hope to use this blog as a forum to share our recipes.

Finally, being inside has also meant we were once again able to work on our art glass gallery Scholaert Cassel. Since our clientele is composed primarily of international collectors, it was time to set up a make shift studio in the old manor and to begin recording much of our inventory which is not yet posted on line.

Our " make shift" photo studio

As a result, we've now posted the first new addition to our on line Ruby Lane Shop in almost 2 years. It happens to be a beautiful American iridescent compote produced by Steuben in the very early part of the 20th century.

Steuben Gold Aurene Compote