Decapitated Cucumber Sandwiches. First Day of 11th Grade.

Note:  Sarah said to tell you how much she enjoyed reading the advice you all left in the recent post about her 17th birthday.  She and I sat for a while last night and discussed the comments and the wisdom that was shared. Thanks so much!) 

And speaking of Sarah, we can’t get into today’s post without a First Day of 11th Grade Picture, now can we?  (We got the cute backpack at a thrift store for $5.  We love our thrift stores!)
 

Tea Party: Part Two

With all that went on with Snowy this past month, I got a little distracted from writing about the second part of Sarah’s birthday tea party; here are a few more details and pictures from her celebration. (As well as the explanation for the decapitated starfish cucumber sandwiches that I referred to in the first edition of this story.) 

I knew Sarah’s tea party wouldn’t be complete without a few exotic delicacies and so we had a platter full of ‘em. The only thing that I made were the chocolate covered strawberries; everything else came from a local grocery store.  It did, however, add up to a rather festive and tea party-worthy collection.

 This is Miss Libby. She was our hostess.

Miss Libby is also the lady who taught Steve and me to dance for Nathan’s wedding and who loaned me the gorgeous jewelry I wore at the wedding.  She’s the kind of lady I want to be when I get into my 70’s.

She set a lovely table, using a lot of things she inherited from her mother.  (Except Miss Libby would pronounce that word, “Muthuh.”  I just love her dignified accent.)

Miss Libby even got out her mother’s old salt cellars because she thought they were suitable for a special occasion.  We sprinkled a little salt from them on to our cucumber sandwiches and felt downright spiffy.

(Trivia question; do any of you remember using salt cellars? Wikipedia has a fascinating article on the subject.)

Miss Libby even bought gifts for the girls: night lights in the shape of purses.  How cute is that?

Okay.  All cuteness aside, the time has now come to finally explain the aforementioned decapitated cucumber sandwich story.  (Because I know you have been losing sleep over it.)

When Sarah first mentioned a tea party, she said she wanted to have cucumber sandwiches because they sounded very English to her.  I’d never made such a thing in my entire life, but Miss Libby came to my rescue with the simplest of recipes:  just spread whipped cream cheese with onions and chives on white bread with the crusts removed. Add thinly sliced cucumbers and a little paprika, and you’re done!  (She also knew of more complicated recipes, but I told her I wanted to keep it simple.)

Then Miss Libby added that it’s always especially nice if you can cut the sandwiches with a cookie cutter for added visual appeal.

Well.  That didn’t sound too hard.  I bought the spread and the bread and took them home to ponder the making of the sandwiches.  Wanting to follow Miss Libby’s instructions to the letter, I rummaged through my cupboards for a cookie cutter and discovered that the only one in my entire possession was in the shape of a star; a rather large star at that. In fact, it was so large, it only allowed for one star shape to be cut out of each slice of bread.

But then I got to thinking that since we live by the ocean (and its accompanying starfish) maybe starfish-shaped cucumber sandwiches would be the absolutely perfect thing to serve! And so I patted myself on the back for my wondrous (accidental) creativity and set myself to carefully cutting out starfish shaped pieces of bread and spreading them with the aforementioned cream cheese. 

An hour before the party, I took them over to Miss Libby’s along with the rest of my food so that we could get everything arranged before the girls arrived.

Miss Libby took a quick glance at my sandwiches and said how lovely they were and how . .  well . . .  very different they were from cucumber sandwiches she had seen in the past that were . . . well . . . quite a bit . . . um . . .smaller and . . . um . . . also round.  (You have to know Miss Libby to understand that she was doing her ultimate Southern Belle best to be diplomatic.)

And as I stared at my monstrous starfish sandwiches, I suddenly came to the sad realization that they were going to take over the entire plate and that their hugeness would leave no room for any of the other dainty delights I had worked so hard to prepare.

And so?  I grabbed a big ol’ kitchen knife and started hacking away at my cream cheesed starfish collection.  (I guess I called such hacking “decapitating” in the earlier reference because I was removing important body parts in a willy-nilly fashion.  I realize that star fish don’t technically have actual heads and so they are probably not capable of being decapitated in a literal sense, but anyway  . . . )

It didn’t dawn on me until mid way through my spontaneous surgical procedure that half of a starfish looks very odd.  It looks very odd, indeed.  In fact, half of a starfish sandwich looks very much like an amoeba that has been caught in mid morph.  Which is not something you would generally look forward to seeing at a Tea Party where salt cellars are used and the hostess says, “muthuh.”

See? Don’t they look “morphed amoeba-ish?” to you?

But alarming cucumber sandwich aside, everyone had a lovely time.

Since we didn’t have an actual birthday cake (we were waiting for Sarah’s official birthday for that), I put candles on a couple petit fours and we sang to her before we started eating. Because if we had waited until after eating the cakes to sing, well, there would have been no cakes to put the candles on, now would there?

Who knew a tea party could be so complicated?

After the morphed and decapitated starfish sandwiches had been consumed and the petit fours had been enjoyed, we ladies gathered in the living room for a tea party photo.

When we got back home, I took a few more pictures of Sarah.

And then we had a photo with this famous fella, knowing it would be Sarah’s last birthday with him.

In summary, our Great Tea Party of 2012 was a unique, unforgettable celebration made all the more special by friends, hats, laughter, food, loveliness–and alarmingly unusual (but tasty)  cucumber sandwiches.