I've been musing on the subject of tea since I wrote my previous post. I thought it might need a bit more explaining, particularly to a non-British audience.
First of all, I'd like to talk about this term 'builder's tea'. This means a cup of tea which is very strong and has a lot of milk and sugar in it. Builders in the UK, you see, are very fond of this sort of tea and tend to have long and very frequent tea breaks while they are working (hence delayed refurbishment). British builders and probably 60-70% of British people use teabags for this. These teabags contain about two teaspoon of tea leaves which somewhat look like dark brown dust.
Britain has always been a class society and it still is, although lots of people deny it. I think this term 'builder's tea' was created by upper class people just to make a point that aristocrat's tea isn't the same as builder's tea. This is entirely my guess and I might be wrong, and I'm not saying which is superior or which I prefer for that matter. I'm a foreigner here.
Another issue with British tea is when to put milk in the cup. It's a standard practice among the builder's tea drinkers to put milk, sugar, and teabags first into their cups like an assembly job, whereas upper class people (as opposed to working class and aspiring rich middle class people) are quite snooty about this and put milk after pouring tea into the cup from a teapot.
The other day I read an interesting science article about the timing of putting milk in tea, and it actually says that tea tastes better if you do it in the builder's way, i.e. milk first and tea later. Apparently milk proteins, which are originally all curled up, begin to unfold when they hit a very high temperature and start holding hands together, if you like. This is why UHT milk doesn't taste as good as fresh milk. Whereas if milk is sitting in the cup waiting for the hot tea to come, it has time to do a bit of warm-up. Read this if you doubt what I'm saying.
Ingredients (for 6-8 cakes):
(for the cakes)
300g plain flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
a pinch of salt
70g sugar
120g cold butter, cut into small dice
1 egg, beaten
120ml crème fraîche (or single cream)
(for the glaze)
1 egg, beaten
(for the filling)
about 250g strawberries
200ml crème fraîche (or whipped double cream. I have clotted cream in the pic.)
Preheat oven to 200C.
Mix the flour, baking powder, half the sugar, and salt in a bowl. Add the cold butter cubes into the bowl and work them into the flour mixture until they start looking like wet sand. In a separate bowl mix the egg and crème fraîche, and start adding the mixture into the flour mixture. I would stop with half of the egg mixture and mix it with flour with a folk. Then add a bit more to make a soft dough. You might not need all the egg liquid.
Turn the dough onto the floured surface and roll to a pastry with about 2cm thickness. Use any round cutter with about 6-7cm in diameter and cut out as many rounds as you can. Re-roll the leftover dough and cut out more rounds until you finish the dough. Put the round dough onto your baking sheet, brush the tops with beaten egg, and put the sheet into the oven. Bake for about 15 minutes.
Leave to cook the shortcakes for a bit and split across the middle into half. Slice the strawberries and sandwich them between the shortcakes with a dollop of whatever cream of your choice.