An Afternoon in Pink

Hello, lovely readers. Are you all geared up towards V-Day? No? Well, me neither, haha. But who needs a Hallmark holiday to inflict a sugar coma on herself, eh? Me, I invited a group of my favourite peeps to a five o'clock tea chez moi. It was actually kind of a substitute for my traditional girly advent gathering which didn't take place in December due to my frequent travelling. I love baking, as you might know by now and I love organising events to the last detail. Any excuse to decorate, really. So, even though eventually only 6 ladies showed up, I had enough sweet treats for a primary school. Doggy bag were compulsory is all I'm saying.

In keeping with the fact that it was the last weekend of Carnival Season, I went with the motto "colourful and sprinkly". What I made:

Traditional American-style cookies with white and dark chocolate, "skinny" lemon & mango cupcakes with lemon icing, chocolate-orange cupcakes with white-chocolate icing...

 ...as well as carrot cake with caramel cream-cheese icing (and self-made chocolate hearts)...

 ...and of course macarons. To be precise, macarons with cream of rose filling:

I was particularly proud of the macarons as this was my third attempt at making something that did not decide to betray me and spread like evil (if tasty) goo on the baking sheet, but retained its shape and tasted decent. Yay! I think the secret to the right texture is that the whipped egg-whites and sugar should be ever so slightly "chewy" and stretchy. I'm still not a big fan of all the gooey mess associated with piping bags.

As my lovely guests came bearing (birthday) gifts, I also got wonderful things. I'm not going to list them all here, but show you the one that matches the theme of a retro tea-party best, the super-cool pink umbrella I got from Amica. Don't you wish you had one yourself?

If you got diabetes or gained 2 kilos from looking at the pics above, don't sue me, ok?