A respectable afternoon tea is composed of 3 tiers – sandwiches, cakes and scones or teacakes. In this article we give you our version.
When we are in for a treat, we love to treat ourselves to an amazing afternoon tea. There are plenty of afternoon tea Malta options available around the Maltese islands, which offer a great selection of savoury and sweet treats. Finding the best afternoon tea on the islands is quite a challenge! An alternative is preparing your own! The great thing about this is that it is so easy to prepare. So if you’d rather have an intimate afternoon tea at home, you can do so without much hassle.
Three tier afternoon teas are the fanciest and poshest tea-time food items available. With a variety of items we got from Whatsinstore we managed to create what we think is a lovely afternoon tea party. Intended to start from the bottom tier, we can find a layer of savoury foods, usually sandwiches.
Following this tier, we can find a tier of scones with the classical selection of clotted cream and jam. This tier serves as an interim between the sweets and the savoury layers. This is arguably our favourite round. The final top tier has delicious sweet treats and is a sweet (pun intended) way to finish off the afternoon tea. Free flowing tea is usually served.
We’ve tried many afternoon teas from around the islands and we’ve also often made them ourselves at home. If you’re not sure how to get started with preparing your own afternoon tea at home, this is the guide you need right now. Feel free to adapt and change any items with anything you’d prefer. We would definitely recommend using a 3-tier afternoon tea set so you can separate the layers per tier. There are plenty of options at leading home stores in Malta and Gozo.
We started our bottom tier with some varied sandwiches. We love mixing up white and brown bread because it gives quite a nice appearance. We used Stork spreadable butter for our sandwiches.
Sandwiches we prepared:
- Cream cheese and Salmon
- Ham, cheese and cucumber
- Egg mayo and baby spinach
As you can see, all three savoury sandwiches were very easy to prepare. You can get as creative as you like with the fillings.
The middle tier consisted of delicious scones we baked at home. These beauties only took us 20 minutes to make eight of these. We prepare our scones with sultanas, but feel free to omit if you prefer yours plain. They came out deliciously fluffy and were very pleasantly enjoyed with some clotted cream (we actually tried brandy clotted cream here which was actually quite lovely), jam and some Novi CremaNovi which we got from Whatsinstore.
We are definitely grateful for Anna, the Duchess of Bedford (1788 – 1861) from England, for making afternoon tea with scones such a popular delight. After tasting scones when a servant brought her a selection at her request for afternoon tea sweet breads, Anna decided that she would like it to be a regular on the menu and requested this delight every day for afternoon tea at 4pm.
The final layer was our personal selection of sweet treats. Jonathan thought that meringues would look really good on our top tier (p.s. He was right). Not only do they look great but they are so easy to make. Just whip up some egg whites with some caster sugar and icing sugar. Bake in a preheated oven and enjoy!
Preparing the merengues!
I wanted to add something chocolatey to the top tier especially since we had more Novi CremaNovi from Whatsinstore left. We decided to add chocolate tarts to this tier. To give this layer more colour, without adding too much work, we also added vanilla custard and raspberry tarts. These were also perfect for this afternoon tea setting because our time was particularly limited and we needed to be able to prepare these without using up too much time.
Overall our 3-tier setting for our afternoon tea was a success. We paired this afternoon tea with PG tea for days (also from Whatsinstore) and enjoyed an afternoon devouring these delicious delights and sipping on tea.
