Food blogger get togethers are fun. But a variation of this is a girl’s only food blogger get together made up of a smaller group of us where we can unashamedly gossip about weddings, shoes and other girly things. So where better to do this at a Champagne High Tea and luckily the We Love Sydney card gives us 2 Champagne High Teas for the price of 1 (2 people for $45). I’m Champagne High tea-ing today with my fellow High Tea lovers Karen, Suze and Reem. Planning this, through a suggestion from Karen was no meat feat entailing over 70 facebook messages. A military style operation if ever I heard of one!
Selection of sandwiches clockwise from bottom left: Smoked Salmon; Cucumber on malted bread; York Ham with mustard mayonnaise and cheddar and vine tomato
We’re given our flutes of champagne soon after we are seated and a plate of sandwiches. We’re sitting at a table right near the window overlooking a small garden. The sandwich selection is: ham & mustard; smoked salmon; cucumber and tomato & cheddar cheese. The smoked salmon is, I feel compelled to add, quite unevenly filled, some sandwiches chock full of smoked salmon while other only have a thin slice. However despite this they are thoroughly delicious (I had one of the thinner sandwiches).
The ham doesn’t find favour with some although I like this. The cucumber isn’t great with the seeds making the bread a bit wet and bizarrely cottage cheese pieces are spread instead of the traditional cream cheese. I find the bread too thick for the tomato and cheddar sandwiches. It should probably be added that the buttering on these sandwiches might be considered verging on the heavy handed (you can see how much butter is used in the smoked salmon sandwiches above with the yellow edging against the coral salmon being butter).
Ronnefeldt’s Earl Grey loose leaf tea
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When I first tried Plan B’s Wagyu burger I became somewhat of a blathering fool. Everyone that I knew was harassed into trying it. When I’m onto a good thing I like to let people know and indeed the Wagyu burger that I had was certainly a thing of sensory beauty: a thick delicious coarse ground beef patty, moist and mouthwateringly delicious, with a come-hither-and-consume-me aroma and a burnished bronze brioche bun. It was probably the best burger I’ve ever had (and I’ve tried many). When I lamented that because I don’t work in the city I find it hard to get my Plan B Burger fix, fellow blogger Reem linked me to the Gourmet Traveller website that had the recipe for their burger. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs I instantly started salivating at the memory. Yes, I could have it again!
The perfect day to have this was of course Australia Day. Our friends Gina and Hot Dog have a pool which usually means a visit there every Australia Day where the mercury reaches Simpson Desert levels. So together with Teena and Phillippe we headed over to their house and we brought the Wagyu burgers.
I saw the recipe stipulated Brioche rolls and I do recall how well they went together – the sweet, buttery golden bun going so well with the moist, flavoursome Wagyu patty. The French patisserie near me had brioche rolls but at over $5 per roll (and I needed 6), I figured I could take this chance to make my own. It was fiddly and high maintenance but the end result was sublime. Light and buttery golden. I baked them on the day and even Gina and Hot Dog who are on strict low carb diets enjoyed them. The recipe below does make far more than you will need but as there is a lot of effort in making brioche I felt that we could always eat them for breakfast or lunch or freeze them if we needed to (they do lose the softness pretty quickly so freezing them is best).
Wagyu patties with melted cheese
As for the Wagyu burger itself, believe it or not, the patty itself is simply 3 main ingredients: Wagyu mince (coarsely ground), breadcrumbs and an egg. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. And with only a few minutes to cook and the most incredibly moist burger produced, I was stunned at how easy it was to make a brilliant Wagyu burger and stunned that so many places do bad ones. I am pleased to report that it got a big thumbs up from everyone. This was after a silence where I was bit concerned (I wondered if perhaps they were being polite to tell me that it wasn’t good) but it turns out that the silence was that of them enjoying the burger. And that is a silence I can wholly understand.
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I don’t know a great deal of good places in Chatswood so when Carrie and I were meeting up to discuss things, I let her choose. For whilst I have a long list of places I’d like to eat, there was a yawning gap as far as Chatswood was concerned. And despite my usual effort of coralling people into going places, I was pleasantly surprised when I let someone else choose where morning tea would be. Ten Ren Tea is on the busy Victoria Avenue in Chatswood and you would never know it but walking through the store and out to the courtyard is a tropical, lush, green oasis, right in the middle of crazy, busy Chatswood.
The menu is huge consisting of Iced Milk teas; cha (tea) with fruit, icees, Exotic Icees, Traditional teas, Border Infusions (ground black tea, rice and sesame) and Cha for healing as well as a page full of Vegetarian snacks and sweets.
I order one of the House Favourites, a sweet potato green milk tea with complementary additions. Yes it’s hot but I’m also persuaded to also order a Crushed Ice with Rose Oriental Beauty tea ($7.50). Carrie orders a green milk tea and a Green Tea crushed ice with 8 treasures ($7.50) . Looking around we see that it’s a haunt for students and there is even a special note on the menu that says “No card games allowed”
Sweet potato and green tea with QQ $7.50
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