Happy 4th of July, folks!
I hope you’re all enjoying a relaxing day with family, friends, and good food. I definitely am! We’re off visiting my husband’s side of the family today, and we’ve got a weekend in Indiana planned with my family next week. In fact, a visit to my family in June gave me the idea for today’s post, which is dedicated to Felicity Merriman, the American Girl doll inspired by the American Revolution.
I first got my Felicity doll when I was just a little girl (six? maybe seven years old?). We did EVERYTHING together, so much so that I’m actually surprised she survived my childhood in one piece. But survive she did, and my mom kept her safe in storage for years until I had a house with room to store her. Last month, I finally got to take her home! As I went through her box of accessories, it got me reminiscing about all the good times we had. The funny thing is, I had been stressing about what book to feature on the blog in July, but when I realized that my scheduled posting day fell on Independence Day…well, a Felicity recipe was just too perfect to pass up!
For today’s recipe, we’re recreating teatime at Miss Manderly’s house from the book Felicity Learns a Lesson. In the story, Felicity must learn to balance her patriot sympathies with her new friendship to a loyalist named Elizabeth. At teatime, Felicity has to choose between drinking tea (which her family is boycotting) or refusing and thereby endangering her friendship with Elizabeth. Her quick solution is awfully clever, and I want to commemorate it today by recreating Miss Manderly’s tea table: an inviting spread of queen cakes, hard biscuits, and black tea.
I used an almond variation on my own sugar cookie recipe for the hard biscuits, but it was trickier to find a queen cake recipe. I wanted an authentic colonial recipe, but it also had to have instructions that would make sense in a modern kitchen. In my search, I stumbled across the blog The English Kitchen, which sounded promising. The recipe there was perfect: quick, easy, remarkably tasting…and not much altered from the colonial version! The only change I made was adding nutmeg, since some variations on queen cakes call for mace (which comes from the same plant), and bits of brown spice are clearly visible in the queen cake illustration in Felicity Learns a Lesson.
Then came time for the finishing touch: a custom tea blend! It’s been a long time since I’ve created one of my custom Adagio teas, so it was fun to stretch my tea-making muscles again. This red, white, and blue inspired blend is flavored with raspberries, blueberries, and almonds to make a rich tea with a distinct hit of juicy berries. I love it with a little sugar and milk.
So fire up some fireworks and put on the kettle. It’s time for a Patriot Tea Party! 😀
NOTE: This post is not sponsored by or affiliated with Mattel, Pleasant Company, or the American Girl brand.