One small way to make your tea guests feel special is to offer them pretty sugar for their tea. The height of tea sugar elegance used to be plain white sugar cubes. They are still popular and definitely better than offering regular granulated sugar. There is something so fanciful about using little sugar tongs to pick up a cube and dropping it into the tea cup.Taking the sugar cube one step further, decorate it! As the picture above shows, add a little flower to the cube. This is easy to do with plain sugar icing. Just mix some confectioners’ sugar and a bit of milk; don’t use butter or it will leave a greasy film on the tea. I usually pipe simple drop flowers in my tea party color and add center dots of icing in a contrasting color. Let the flowers harden before storing them. Your guests will think you spent hours on this but really it takes longer to wash the decorating bags and tips than it does to pipe the flowers.
If you aren’t into piping or don’t have time, another little trick is to dip one side of the sugar cube into food coloring. You’ll get a pretty edge of color on every cube. Again, allow the cubes to harden before storing or they might melt.
One of my favorite sugars to use for tea is demerara. Demerara sugar is coarse-grained, partially refined raw sugar. Demerara sugar comes in various shades of golden brown and has a molasses flavor. Turbinado sugar is a further refined type of demerara sugar with a pale color and a mild flavor. Here in my part of the world, we’ve been seeing a lot of advertising for “Sugar in the Raw” which is simply Turbinado sugar from Hawaii.
La Perruche brand sugar lumps are rough-cut chunks from cane sugar. They too are fun to serve at tea. You’ll recognize La Perruche sugar when you see the parrot on the label. This sugar comes in both white and brown, as shown above.You don’t have to wait to try these sugar ideas until your next tea party. Treat for yourself and use them at your daily tea break.
