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Although we call this type of gathering literally "afternoon tea", on my youtube video I was confused whether I should call it "afternoon tea" or "high tea", and I'm still not sure about the title.

The menu is more like the British high tea minus the timing and the purpose. However, the purpose is more like "afternoon tea". The literal difference between the two is the high tea is served on a dining table and it is more like dinner, hence "high"; and the afternoon tea, also known as "low tea", is served on a low table with a wide selection of tea types with few food options like scones with jam and clotted cream and couple of sandwiches.

anyway...



Around 2 PM or so, gathering at a friend's home to have tea with a large menu containing a lot of pastries, salads and desserts is a common tradition for Turkish women. They put on their nicest clothes, place their clean high heels into a bag since Turks do not enter the house with outside shoes on, therefore the women almost always have separate clean shoes for home gatherings and for the outside. One by one they ring the bell of the host's house.

It is a great opportunity to relax, have a nice time with your friends accompanied by almost-limitless delicious food and a thousand cups of tea. They share their latest news about their family, their sorrows and worries, new knitting and crochet patterns with lots and lots of laughter. Some even dance and turn this into a proper party, some read their favourite books out-loud but respectfully. Regardless, it is always fun.

Depending on your guests' formality and number, the menu's content varies from less to more.

I prefer to plan the menu days before and start the preparations days ahead. Some recipes can easily be done a week before and stored in the freezer to keep them fresh or others like in this video can only be done a day before and stored in the fridge overnight to prevent unnecessary chaos that day. this way is easier, less tiring and calmer.

My menu was:

• stuffed vine leaves and dried peppers and eggplants
• bulgur salad called "kısır", it is a sort of tabbouleh
• zucchini, carrot and mushroom salad with yoghurt
• roasted beet and mushroom salad with arugula
• cheesy galettes
• layered buns
• su böreği
• apple rolls 
• cheesecake with sour cherry sauce
• red fruits kompot
• turkish tea, obviously

what are your afternoon tea traditions in your neck of the woods?

This post is basically yesterday's Gingerbread House's continuation. As I worked hard until the evening for the house, making this cake was left for the next morning. For the Gingerbread House's detailed instructions and recipe click here: "I Made A Gingerbread House With The Best Roof Tricks & My Worse Mistakes | Silent Vlog" 


I was initially planning to make an "Angel Food Cake with Blueberry Icing", however after watching several youtube videos and reading blog posts, I realised that I needed a special mould for the cake or at least I can't risk making something I've never tried before that day. I will try making the cake one day in the future.

But the lilac icing was a must-do, so I thought lemon goes well with blueberries. Being tired from yesterday's gingerbread house mayhem, I used my go-to cake recipe with a little twist: lemon juice and zest.

I already bought these dried red clovers for the lilac icing. Red clovers are used as a herbal tea and apparently it is good for many things although I purely bought it because of its colour. Hopefully, I will make a video about my tea collection soon, and this has become the newest addition.

It looks a little grey in the photo but if you watch the video, you'll see the icing's beautiful purple first and then light lilac colour. I was a little sceptical to make the icing full purple and now I'm regretting my non-courageous decision. So if you need a grey coloured icing, here is your solution: use fewer blueberries.

Next time, there will be a full purple icing over the cake, I promise.



Turkish cake recipes usually contain olive oil instead of butter. Olive oil makes the cake light and moist, and butter makes it moist and dense. I like both. You can twist this cake recipe by using different fruity and flowery flavours like rose water, lemon or orange juice and zest. If I make the cake with orange juice, first, I squeeze one orange and measure the juice if it's not a full cup, I fill the cup with milk. In this recipe, you need "1 cup of liquid" whether it's milk or juice. Since lemon doesn't have much juice, I just added a few spoons more flour.

In my opinion, chocolate and cacao or cinnamon and nuts always go well with the buttery recipes.



So here is my go-to cake recipe:

ingredients

1 cup sugar
1 cup olive oil
1 cup milk
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
3 cups all-purpose flour (plus 2 spoons if the batter is too liquidy)
3 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

for the blueberry icing

15 blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
3 cups milk
5 tbsp wheat or corn starch

method

Preheat the oven to 180C.
In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt.
In a large bowl, using an electric mixer set on medium-high speed, whisk the sugar and eggs until light and fluffy.
Whisk in olive oil, milk, lemon juice and zest, until blended well.
Reduce the speed low and add the flour, baking powder and salt and whisk until the batter is smooth.
Pour the batter in a medium-sized cake pan and bake it for 40 minutes or so in a 180C heated oven.
Take the cake from the oven and turn it over a rack to let it cool.
For the icing;
In a saucepan, combine the sugar, starch and milk.
While stirring with a hand whisk, cook it over medium heat until it's boiling.
Turn it off the heat and let it cool.
With a hand blender or a food processor, purée the icing well in case there are any lumps. This will make the icing or as we call it in Turkish "the cream" silky smooth.
Pour the icing over the cake slowly.
Decorate it with the red clovers.

I've always wanted to make a gingerbread house from scratch after watching all the episodes of Bake Off and random youtube videos showing how quickly and easily to make and build one got me hooked. Little did I know, it was going to take me 7 hours to actually make one plus countless anxiety attacks, and quite unnecessarily so.

I filmed every step of me making the house, even my clumsy piping skills. Do I regret doing this? I, absolutely, don't! I'm even planning to do the whole thing again. Since I tend to make the same mistakes over and over when I'm cooking or baking, it is a good thing that I made this video as a guide.


Here are my tips:

Watch as many youtube videos as possible, as I did. Among them, I have to give a shoutout to Tasty's gingerbread recipe and video. It is the best and most useful one to watch.

Another recipe I checked out was Mary Berry's gingerbread house. There is a template PDF for the house on the page which is the one I used on the video.

Mary Berry's recipe didn't sound so right to me at first so I mainly went with the Tasty's, though I adjusted some things. But the next time I'll try Mary Berry's recipe.

Tasty's recipe has definitely too much ginger, shortening which is a big no-no for me, though the royal icing recipe I used it to the T and I have no complains about it.

Mary Berry's recipe has golden syrup instead of molasses -I guess to give off a lighter brownish look- and this threw me off since I'm not familiar with it. I thought about replacing it with honey but couldn't be sure about the consistency of both. She is famous with her crunchy gingerbread cookies, I'll definitely try this recipe next time because mine wasn't crunchy at all actually. Don't get me wrong, it did taste yummy but not crunchy. I don't know if it's because Istanbul is such a humid city and that made the house softened overnight or it was because of the recipe itself. I have leftover dough in the freezer, so I will find out that later.

The house was fine though, it didn't crumble, it was super strong and was absolutely difficult to break the whole thing down at the end of the day. Maybe this is how a gingerbread house should be, I've never eaten one before, so I don't actually know about its correct texture.

The two recipes' method is almost the same. Both of them melt the shortening/butter and molasses/syrup first and combine it with the dry ingredients.

Now I'm looking at the pictures, I realise I rolled out the dough thinner than the size stated in the recipes. But it didn't happen anything dreadful, thankfully.

Roll out and cut the dough on the baking paper. Because transferring the dough to the baking paper later messes up the shape and thins the dough further.

Cut the windows and door after the walls are baked. You know how buttery cookies are soft at first when they are out of the oven but get hardens later? Cut the windows carefully, when they are still soft. Not when they are too hot to touch, though. I baked the first wall and experimented the time I should cut out the windows and then I baked the others. Just to be safe.

Candy Glass Windows were, unnecessarily the scariest thing ever about the whole process or after the roof, and it turns out it is as easy as it looks. Just buy some hard candy -I got pink- crush them into a couple of pieces. Place the crushed candies into the cut-out windows and bake the walls until the candies are completely melted. I time-lapsed the whole thing on the video in which you can see my shadow watching frantically other candy melting videos and checking if I missed a step or not. Why did I get anxiety attacks about this easy-to-do thing, I have no idea. Then in the last batch, I got over-confident and also tired of crushing the candies and put less into one of the walls. The next morning those windows were melting. The others were absolutely fine.

Placing the roof caused another anxiety attack, but this time rightfully so. The tip of glueing a paper bag into the roof with icing and letting it dry in the vertical angle of the roof is a genius idea. Do these and the roof will be ok. I placed the template upside down to find the exact angle and support it with bowls. I added another tip to this geniusness by supporting the roof with cardboard pieces.

The walls were 17 cm wide and with this amount of ingredients, I got leftover dough in the freezer. So that means my house was 289 cm2. LOL liveable.

I don't have a printer so I opened the pdf on my screen and decreased the size until I got 17 cm wide walls, then placed a regular white paper over it and traced the template. I have to say, this scale is more than enough. 17 cm looks and sounds small but the end result was quite large.

Don't forget to watch the video to see the whole thing detailed and here is my recipe for the gingerbread house:

Ingredients 

(I didn't scale it I just used cups)

225 gr unsalted butter
1 cup (200gr) sugar
1 cup (335 gr) black mulberry molasses
5 cups (625 gr) all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
3 tsp ground ginger (1 tsp is more than enough, in my opinion, I wouldn't use 3 tsp next time)
crushed hard candy for the windows

Royal icing

4 large egg whites
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
6 cups powdered sugar (720 g), sifted
a little bit water for decorating

method

Preheat the oven to 350ºF (180ºC).
Melt the butter, sugar and molasses together in a large pan.
Sieve the flour, baking powder, ground ginger and cinnamon together into a large bowl, set aside.
Pour the not-to-hot melted butter mixture into a mixing bowl.
Gradually add in the flour mixture while stirring and knead the mixture into a stiff dough.
Divide the mixture into five equally-sized pieces, cut one of these pieces in half (so you have six pieces in total). With this equation, I had one piece as a leftover but you do that anyway.
Cover the pieces of dough with a plastic wrap to keep the dough warm.
Take a piece and roll it out on a baking paper to 1/2cm thick. I think it should be just a little bit thicker.
Using the templates, cut out the sections of the house. Two front and back, two sides, two roof pieces and other small pieces. Don't cut out the windows and door yet.
Take the baking paper with cut-out sections on and place it into a tray.
Bake it 7-8 minutes.
Take the baked sections out of the oven. Wait one or half a minute to let it a little cool, the using the template as a guide cut out the windows and door with a knife carefully.
Place the crushed candy into the windows, be careful not to leave any pieces over the walls. Be generous but don't overdo it. Check out the video for reference.
Return all the cookie walls with candy windows to the oven and continue to bake until the candy has melted.
Remove the cookies from the oven and let it cool.
Make the royal icing. In a large bowl, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar until frothy. Gradually add the powdered sugar one cup at a time, until the icing is smooth and thick, like a little bit melted marshmallows.
This consistency is to glue the house together. For decoration, you should add just a few drops of water and mix well to thin it. I missed this part and used the thick glueing icing for decorating.
Assemble the gingerbread house with royal icing.
Find a base, put some icing and first place the sidewalls into the icing like sticking something into snow.
Put a bowl into the middle to support the walls until the icing is dried enough.
Pipe some icing onto the edges of the walls.
Place the back wall and take out the support bowl.
Place the front wall. Make sure everything is dried and stuck.
For the roof watch the video to see this process, I honestly don't know how to explain this as detailed as possible.
Dust the gingerbread house with powdered sugar right before you serve it.

Don't be afraid and try to make this at home. It is tiring but super fun.