The Perfect Cornish Cream Tea with our Bone China Mugs

Cornwall is famous for many things but for Allison and I, we are quietly obsessed with cream teas. We will often forgo lunch and have a cream tea instead. We've got our favourite places and they always involve a great view and plenty of cream!

So, what makes the perfect cream tea? There's a lot of controversy about where to put the jam, should it be jam first or jam on top? If you're Cornish then it will always be jam first with the cream on top, but if you're from Devon, then it'll most definitely be jam on top!  

Food scientist Dr Stuart Farrimond and baker Mich Turner claim that a formula of 4:3:3 will give you the perfect cream tea. So a 40g scone with 30g of jam and 30g of cream. Dr Stuart says that this “ratio will achieve a hedonic breakpoint: the ideal level of sweetness (around 28 per cent per mouthful) from the jam, balanced out by the cool cream and simple scone.”
 
For me, it’s very important that the scone isn’t too big. There is a trend to make scones really huge but this isn’t what they should be like and traditionally a split was used rather than a scone. Splits are a soft bread roll and if you head over to Rodda’s website they have a recipe, should you want to give it a try
https://www.roddas.co.uk/recipes/recipe/traditional-cornish-splits/

There are hundreds of recipes for scones with all sorts of variations on the traditional one, but we like this one by Delia Smith. Tried and tested, you won't be disappointed.

Next, the jam. If you’re lucky enough to experience a scone laden in homemade jam then you’ll struggle to find anything to live up to it, but buy the best quality you can, usually strawberry, but we are very partial to raspberry here at Cream Cornwall. Just recently, Allison had raspberry scones served with lemon curd, although not traditional, she said it was her idea of going to heaven.  

Then comes the cream, personally I get as much on as I can as that’s my favourite part. I can very easily eat cream straight form the tub and when I lived in Australia I dreamt about Cornish cream. The first thing I did when I came home was to have a pasty followed by a cream tea!

Finally, the tea. We’ve all got our favourite brand and the way we like it brewed but nothing can beat loose leaf tea served in a tea pot in bone china. Once you drink tea in a bone china cup, there’s no going back. 

We’d love to hear about your favourite places for a cream tea so  #tag us with a photo on instagram @creamcornwall