Valentine Day Theme of Red and Gold Sweets
Recipe and Photos by Ellen Easton 2020 – All Rights Reserved. – Check out more of Ellen Easton’s Tea Travels™ articles and recipes.
Decorating Teatime Sweets for Valentine’s day or any other festive occasion. One need not be a professional to enhance beautiful treats.
Mini Strawberry Shortcake Heart
Mini Macaroon with Drags Heart
Mini Vanilla Meringue Kiss with Painted Food Coloring
Mini Vanilla Cupcake with Drags and/or Edible Flowers
Bite Size Orange-Poppy Seed Pound Cakes with Edible Flower
Bite Size Scallop Crepe Cake with Edible Crystallized Flowers
Recommended Tools and Garnishes:
Small and mini cookie cutters, scissors, vegetable scraper, thin paint brush, food coloring gel, wax paper,
Refined sugar, dragees, sprinkles, semi-sweet chocolate squares, edible flowers, and crystallized flowers.
Note – All recommended shapes are interchangeable and not limited to the samples above.
Mini Strawberry Hearts:
Wash, hull, and slice fresh strawberries in half. With a tiny heart-shape cookie cutter or by free hand, cut shapes into useable pieces.
Mini Strawberry Short Cake:
Prepare a basic pound cake recipe and bake according to your recipe. Once baked, freeze until ready to use.
Remove from freezer and cut into 1- to 2-inch slices. While still cold, using a heart-shape cookie cutter, cut into shapes.
Place whipped cream on the bottom layer and place fresh thinly-sliced strawberries on top of the whipped cream. Set the second layer of pound cake on top and repeat with another layer of whipped cream.
To decorate, add small strawberry hearts to the top layer.
Mini Cupcake with Dragees and/or Edible Flower:
Mini Vanilla Cupcakes:
Check out Ellen’s Mini Vanilla Cupcake recipe.
Frost the baked and cooled cupcakes in the color and flavor of your choice with buttercream icing. Decorate with easy-to-use toppings of edible flowers, sprinkles, shaved chocolate, and/or dragees.
Shaved Chocolate: Place a vegetable scraper at the corner of a semi-sweet baking chocolate square. Shave until thin curls form. Shake off the curls and shavings onto wax paper and repeat.
Bite Size Orange-Poppy Seed Pound Cakes with Edible Flower
Bite Size Orange-Poppy Seed Pound Cake:
Check out Ellen’s Quatre-Quarts Pound Cake recipe.
Prepare a basic pound cake recipe, adding 1 tablespoon orange extract and 1 tablespoon poppy seeds to the batter. Bake according to your recipe. Once baked, freeze until ready to use.
Remove from freezer and cut into 1- to 2-inch slices. While still cold, using a heart-shape cookie cutter, cut into shapes. To garnish, add an edible flower.
Hand Painted Meringue Kiss:
Mini Macaroon with Heart Drags:
Check out Ellen’s Mini Vanilla Meringue Kiss recipe.
To dress up your macaroons, color the batter with food coloring. When removed from the oven and still warm, take the tip of a toothpick and poke one hole for each drag into the top of of layer of the macaroon in the pattern of your design. Gently place and securely press one drag into each indent.
Bite Size Scallop Crepe Cake with Crystallized Flowers:
Check out Ellen’s Crepe Cake recipe.
Prepare crepes and pastry cre filling in the flavor you desire. Using a cookie cutter in the shape of your choice, prepare ten (10) of crepes to be used per bite size piece.
With a flat knife or small spatula, place the pastry cre on a layer of crepe. Repeat this until all 10 layers have been filled. Top with a mini edible crystallized flower.
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Ellen Easton, author of Afternoon Tea~Tips, Terms and Traditions (RED WAGON PRESS), a lifestyle and etiquette industry leader, keynote speaker and product spokesperson, is a hospitality, design, and retail consultant whose clients have included The Waldorf=Astoria and Plaza Hotels. Easton’s family traces their tea roots to the early 1800s, when ancestors first introduced tea plants from India and China to the Colony of Ceylon, thus building one of the largest and best cultivated teas estates on the island.
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