Adventures in High Altitude Cooking: High Tea Scones

Last Friday night all the missionary ladies and daughters were invited to Regina's house for a Mother/Daughter Tea. I don't have a mother or daughter here but since I am a daughter, I was included in the event. I wanted to bring something tea-like so I decided to bring cucumber sandwiches and scones.

The cucumber sandwiches were no trouble because cream cheese is currently available at the grocery store close by. White "north american" style sliced bread was also available (despite the popularity for fresh bread instead of the prepackaged kind). So, I created a lovely tray of cucumber sandwiches and decorated it with grapes.

Now for the SCONES!
Here are the steps to Scone Making in Peru:

1. Find scone recipes and translate them to Spanish...all the while learning new words for "flatten", "triangular peices" and "cookie sheet".

2. Leave recipes for your faithful housekeeper.

3. Come home to find your poor housekeeper (who never even heard of scones) having some difficulties.

4. Help out your housekeeper and end up with scones that actually look like scones (instead of burnt cookies).

5. Enjoy the scones during the tea (and the "scone cookies" for the rest of the week).

The Cream:
The second step to the tea time snacks was to create a fake Devonshire or clotted cream. I used cream cheese instead of the rare cheese (from the cream cheese family) that I'm sure is only available in the United Kingdom. I mixed the cream cheese with cream, sugar and vanilla. The result was delicious but unfortunately I forgot the cream at home for the tea. Ah well, I enjoyed eating it all week with the left-over scones and scone cookies. We even made another batch of it this week to eat with fruit salad!!! YUM!! I also took some scones and cream to my hard-working and faithful housekeeper who had to put up with this gringa's strange recipe!!!

Our tea was lovely! There were about 18 moms and kids and we had lots of yummy finger foods and deserts. Afterwards we had a little program with dances by Destiny, Hannah & Orianna, a poem, a reading of a letter and a piano duet. It was a very sweet evening and a wonderful way to spend my first TEA in PERU!!!