Cardinal Tea Room (Montreal, Canada)

Chinese New Year is just around the corner. Last weekend turned out to be pretty busy as well. On the mission to buy some flowers to decorate the house, as I usually do every year for Chinese New Year, my friend took me to the Cardinal Tea Room for lunch on the way. For those of you who don’t know, I love tea. Love it so much and obviously, seeing as I (used to) bake a lot (and would if I have more time), I love sweets and pastries and the likes. This cute little place seemed right up my alley.

Let’s go!

Cardinal Tea Room

Decor

Cardinal Tea Room is very welcoming. In fact, its almost like walking into another world. Its quaint and cute with lots of more antique sort of elegance to it. There’s old books in wooden bookcases and mirrors and old-fashioned lights. There’s a beautiful chandelier hanging in the centre of their two storey tea room and a piano near the stairs. The places are decorated with these green lights that we’d usually see at older libraries.

Tea, Pastries & Sandwiches

Oolong Tea

Sausage Rolls

Blueberry Scone (my friend’s pastry)

Open-face Sandwich (my friend’s lunch)

Cardinal Cake: Apple & Walnut Tart

Nice presentation with their very beautiful plates along with delicious food makes this place very nice. While these are rather simple things, the sausage roll is really good for one. The apple tart was really nice. I’m personally not a huge fan of walnut and somehow apple and walnut seems like an odd combination, maybe pecans would be better. However, this tart did grow on me, maybe a hint of the cinnamon (I think) made it tasty. My friend had the blueberry scones which is made with some milk ingredients, cream I believe, so I didn’t get to try it and I wasn’t into sandwiches, but I believe it was good. However, I was impressed with the tea selection although I would have liked a better selection of Chinese tea but that isn’t their crowd probably.

Overall, Cardinal Tea Room is a lovely little tea and pastry restaurant. The service was good and the decor is cozy and charming. The food is pretty good and the tea selection is nice. Definitely somewhere I would like to go again.

Baking: Cranberry Scones!

More cranberries!

I’m about to give up on this, but then I only have 3/4 pouch left.  So, after talking about making scones for weeks, here I am! I dug out a recipe on Martha Stewart site (a place I haven’t ventured to in a long time) and made these 🙂

You can find the recipe here: http://www.marthastewart.com/338474/cranberry-scones

There were a few modifications to the recipe.

• As usual, I used Gluten-Free flour because thats all I have now. And its a lifestyle I’m working on. There is one thing to note about gluten-free anything is that it makes baked goods slightly more dry and in the case of an already pretty dry baked goods, like scones, there needs to be some moderation if you like.
• I estimated the amount of butter, mostly because I only had two little slabs left so I could only work with what I had…
• Half and half means milk and cream.  I used almond milk (2/3 cup) and then instead of cream, I used raspberry yogourt.  I would have preferred to use vanilla but it was a choice between raspberry and blueberry.

The scones tasted good but I’m guessing because of the gluten-free flours, it felt even more dry than it usually would.  The cranberries added a burst of flavor and there were still hints of the raspberry yogourt in there which really helped.  However, I’d say it was a success because matched with tea in the morning, it was pretty good 🙂

I don’t make scones often so there’s still a lot of improvement that I can make on this.

Do you like scones? What do you like to add to it? 

I still have one more cranberry baking adventure. Any suggestions?