Serves: 5
Total Calories: 758
A special challenge of the modern age is to have holidays that are consistently meaningful, not ones that are dictated by window displays and the calendar. Karen K wan has met that challenge: She and her mother play host to an extended family in a Christmas-season tea.
They invite about thirty women over: "It's sort of like THE JOY LUCK CLUB," Karen says, "where I call most of the women 'Auntie,' even though we're not blood-related. My mother and I usually try to split the cooking up, and do about half each. First we do miniatures--about twenty to twenty-five items--like individual cakes, cookies, tartlets and sandwiches. It's quite an elaborate thing. We usually do two kinds of scones, a variety of tartlets-fruit tarts, chocolate ganache, lemon meringue and custard-and then we'll do little cakes, like a cake roll with mocha cream, and then a variety of traditional tea sandwiches, like smoked chicken or smoked salmon and cucumber. We try to keep it traditional. We get out all the tea services. It's really fun."
Karen, a newlywed and art director for an advertising agency, says her mother prepared her daughters for this kind of delicate work from an early age. "She had us in the kitchen from age three on, helping her roll out pie crusts. She had a philosophy about kids doing the pie crustsbecause we had really tiny hands and a light touch, she thought the crusts worked out better than those made with adult-sized hands."
As Karen has proved with her Grilled Chicken and Mango Corn Salad, some cooks never lose their delicate toucp, lacing together inspiration and tradition for exciting meals.
From "Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off® Cookbook." Copyright 2004 General Mills. Used with permission of the publisher, Wiley Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This __Karen Kwan recipe is from the Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off® Cookbook Cookbook. Download this Cookbook today.
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