The Gird Your Loins Tea – Saturday 27th August 2016
The Duke of Edinburgh Hotel, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria £10.95 for Afternoon Tea (£3 extra for a glass of prosecco)
So the summer holidays for those of us in the English education system draws to a close and it was time for me and the lovely W to have a catch up as we haven’t seen each other since the end of July. It was also time for the now annual back to school tea to fortify ourselves for the onslaught of a new term and the dark slog to Christmas. That makes it sound like we are being forced down the pit or something. Not the right image at all. It’s just that by the time we get to Christmas the days are short, nights are long, and these balmy, hazy summer afternoons just a distant Shangri-La of hope.
On arrival our table was waiting in the main bar area and we were quickly provided with a big pot of tea and asked if we would like anything stronger too. In light of our need for bracing against the relentless pull of the Autumn Term we decided to go the whole hog and order a whole bottle of prosecco rather than just a mere glass each. A good plan. Alternating a sip of bubbles and a slurp of tea made for a jolly afternoon.
Our cake stand was of the slate variety, and definitely wobbly, but was packed full of enough food to make us want to dive straight in. The big pile of sandwiches on the bottom layer provided us with three large fingers of 4 kinds of sandwiches, all meat free as I had remembered to tell them in advance that both of us didn’t eat it. It did mean we had two fish varieties, which is not a problem for me but W doesn’t really eat much fish at all so it was a bit of overkill for her. The cheese savoury was a good sandwich, not too much mayo and a good cheesy flavour, and the sunblush tomato and cream cheese was nice too, if a little heavy handed on the tomato. W tried the tuna mayo sandwich and pronounced it just ‘OK’ whilst I tucked into the thickly filled smoked salmon and cream cheese variety. A decent selection, but rather a reliance on cream cheese I felt.
The cakes on the stand were next, and the cake strategy was put into action. Sort of. There were three little macarons each. I will not call them dainty as they were a bit lumpen and not smooth as a macaron should be and had one half bigger than the other. We decided in determining our tactics to start with one of them then have a cake, then a macaron, then a cake, finishing off with a macaron. Tasting the first macaron was a bit disappointing, it was overcooked, far too crispy, full of lumps of almond and sandwiched with cream. Not a good start. The lemon drizzle cake made up for this though. It was moist, sweet and the raspberry on top gave a fantastic tart contrast to the sugariness of the cake. I had another macaron, and was disappointed all over again so decided to call it a day with them and not go for the final one, I instead just ate the dense, fudgy brownie which was so darkly chocolatey that it left a dry after taste.
And finally we got to the scones, with jam and Chantilly cream. They were a bit dry, although full of fruit and could have done with a bit of butter before applying the jam and cream. The jam was from one of those individual pots that I am not a fan of, but was a nice strawberry flavour, but there really could have been more of it to make the scone less dry. The Chantilly cream bothered me, however. Not the fact that it was Chantilly not clotted, that I can forgive for such a bargain price. But it just tasted odd, not of vanilla as it should but very strongly almondy. In fact it was so odd I scraped most of it off my second half of scone as I really didn’t like it at all.
We sat for a fair while after we had finished eating. There was prosecco to drink and no rush to be anywhere. There were also stories of holidays to catch up on and other Teas to plan and it was nice to sit and not be rushing to drive off back home as we had both arrived on shank’s pony, having planned in advance we were having our bubbles. But as the ‘finished shopping and dropping in for a quick snifter on the way home’ crowd began to morph into the ‘early start for a good Saturday night sesh’ mob we called it a day. The venue is, after all, a pub bar without much of a view apart from the busy road outside and that can only entertain for so long.
Overall marks (out of 5 stars)
Service: *** Prompt and attentive in a pub bar staff kind of way
Amount of Food: *** We weren’t overwhelmed with food, but there was a decent amount of sandwiches each
Quality of Food: **1/2 The cakes were generally not a good bake
Value for money: *** Not bad as the food was fresh and definitely made on the premises
Description: ‘High quality napkins’ ‘bit of a Brit Pop vibe here’
The website is here http://www.dukeofedinburghhotel.co.uk/
They are on Trip Advisor https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_Review-g190821-d679951-Reviews-The_Duke_of_Edinburgh_Hotel-Barrow_in_Furness_Lake_District_Cumbria_England.html they are also on Facebook.
And my suggested track for today’s tea is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzQYtpjMjSo
helenwedgwood 