I wish I could say that I haven’t posted in a week because I wanted to lead up to this amazing post that I’m about to do…but the truth is, I’ve just been too busy to bake. My dessert intake last week mainly consisted of pretzels dipped in Nutella. And there isn’t much of a blog entry in that. However, I’ve finally put together my very first restaurant review! And it’s one that is 100% appropriate for this blog. It’s cute and sweet and girly! I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner.
My girlfriends and I have been dying to go for tea at the Rutherford House on the U of A campus for months now. We finally got ourselves organized though and made a reservation for yesterday as kind of a Valentine’s Day girls date. Not that we’re all single and bitter or anything…it’s just that we’ve accepted the fact that the men in our lives would never take us on such a cute date so we might as well just take each other instead. Makes perfect sense, right?
So we all wore girly dresses and spent the afternoon in the lovely Arbour Restaurant at Rutherford House. The “dining room” area where we were seated was much smaller than I expected (the picture on the website makes it look bigger) so I understood why reservations were needed. It’s was an intimate and beautiful space though, with one wall completely made of windows allowing for lots of natural light.
There were 6 of us, so we ended up pairing up and splitting 3 of the different “Afternoon Tea” options they had.
Krystyn and Sandi had The Arbour High Tea ($42 for two) which consisted of a choice of either cucumber or egg salad finger sandwiches followed by a turkey pot pie, a course of sweet scones and an assortment of cookies, dainties and fresh fruit for dessert. Lindz and I shared Mrs. Rutherford’s Tea ($34 for two) which consisted of herbed cream cheese pinwheels and a choice of either cucumber or egg salad finger sandwiches, sweet scones as well as an assortment of cookies, dainties and fresh fruit. Lastly, Steph and Karen shared Hazel’s Tea ($24 for two) which was sweet scones, cookies, dainties and fresh fruit.
Each pair also had a pot of the Rutherford House blend tea (included with the food) which was an earl grey tea with notes of jasmine.
Needless to say, everything was ridiculously delicious. The tea was sublime (I had about 8 cups…) and all the food was amazing. The herbed pinwheels and cucumber sandwiches were so cute and dainty, which was a good thing as there was so much food to try, it would be easy to get full too fast.
The turkey pot pies were probably the cutest things I had ever seen – and they smelled amazing! They also had huge sprigs of rosemary in them...and I’m a huge fan of rosemary.
The cookies and dainties were pretty standard, though the pink-topped squares were probably my favorite. They seemed to be a layer of gram crackers, a layer of walnuts and then a layer of pink icing to finish.
Finally, there were the scones…big, warm, delicious scones with a generous serving of raspberry butter and Devonshire cream. I couldn’t get enough. I actually think I love Devonshire cream more than I love most people in this world.
So all in all, it was a lovely afternoon – one I would definitely repeat. In fact, I may just go back there for more scones and tea…
The ladies (Sandi, Krystyn, Lindsey, myself, Steph & Karen).
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