An Afternoon Tea Inspired by Cinderella

We love throwing tea parties at our house!  After our AMAZING experience at the Grand Floridian Garden View Tea Room (read my full review HERE), I decided we needed to throw our very own tea parties at home! A couple weeks ago, we put together an Afternoon Tea inspired by Snow White and the apple picking season of fall.  You can check out what we did HERE!  For this Afternoon Tea Party, we decided to embrace all things pumpkin.  And nothing screams pumpkin like the much-adored Disney film, Cinderella. So I set forth coming up with a menu for An Afternoon Tea inspired by Cinderella!

I love pumpkin spice and all things pumpkin.  If that makes me basic, then NO SHAME HERE!  I think pumpkin is so appealing to me because of its seasonality.  You know when pumpkin spice hits the shelves, the holidays are around the corner.  This means spending more time with family and creating cherished memories and traditions to last a lifetime.  Sappy, I know.  But that’s what the holidays mean to me!

Ok…back to pumpkin.  I had a lot of fun digging through recipes to create a menu for an Afternoon Tea Inspired by Cinderella. I wanted a balance of sweet and savory, and pumpkin is a GREAT ingredient to achieve that!  For a traditional afternoon tea feel, you will want to serve small sandwiches and savories, scones, and small desserts on a tiered serving tray. 

Download a printable version of our Afternoon Tea Inspired by Cinderella menu here:

I will break down what I offered on each tier a little later.  But first, you will want a delicious tea to pair with your patisseries!

The Tea

Keeping Cinderella and our pumpkin theme in mind, we decided to enjoy a Pumpkin Spice Black Tea from The Republic of Tea.  This tea is an autumnal spice blend, which paired perfectly with our treats and savories.  We were fortunate to find this tea at our local grocery store, but it is also available to order from Amazon. Some other Amazon tea brands I recommend for this pumpkin inspired tea party include Pumpkin Spice Tea by Yogi Tea, Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Spice Rooibos Herbal Blend, and Twinings of London Pumpkin Spice Chai Tea. 

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If you have little ones who wouldn’t be interested in sipping on tea, I recommend serving some apple cider, juice, or even just chocolate milk to involve them in the festivities.

Tea Sandwiches and Savories

For a traditional afternoon tea, the bottom tier of your serving tray should include finger sandwiches and savories.  I realized for my Snow White Tea Party, I went a little overboard offering four different options. So for this tea party I scaled it back to three. 

The first offering I made was a pumpkin chicken salad served on 12-grain bread.  This Pumpkin Chicken Salad Recipe comes from Kim’s Cravings.  I thought it was a really unique idea and the recipe turned out great!  I’m all for taking creative liberties when in the kitchen, so I decided to add some chopped leek, dried cranberries, and pecans to my chicken salad recipe.  To spice things up, I also threw in 1/2 tsp garlic and onion powders as well as 1 tsp black pepper and seasoned salt. I prepared the chicken salad itself a couple days before the party, so that I only needed to assemble the sandwiches the day of.  I built the sandwiches on the 12-grain bread, trimmed the crusts, and cut into slender “fingers” for that true tea party feel.  Everyone enjoyed this recipe! 

For my next savory, I found this interesting recipe for Pumpkin Hummus from Delightful Mom Food.  Again, I was excited about this recipe because I had never heard of a pumpkin hummus recipe before!  I decided to whip this hummus up to make pinwheels for the tea party.  The hummus itself was VERY good, but it was pretty garlicy.  If you are not a huge fan of garlic, I recommend scaling it back a bit.  I made the recipe as it was called for a day before the party so that it would be ready. 

The day of the tea party, I spread the hummus on tortillas and sprinkled on some dried cranberries, green onion, and chopped pecans.  I thought these were so tasty (and ate the rest of the hummus myself over the next few days)!  My four-year-old mentioned she thought the pinwheels were “spicy” which I think was due to the garlic, but she ate them anyway.  She is such a trooper haha.

The final savory offering I choose was this Pumpkin-Leek Tart recipe from TeaTime Magazine.  I have never made tarts before, so this was something new and fun to try!  The fact that the recipe calls for prepared pie dough took a lot of stress out of baking them haha.  I do not have any tart pans, so I decided to make the tarts with my mini muffin tin which worked out just fine.  I also choose to omit the prosciutto from our tarts, just a personal preference!  My kids loved these tarts, I hardly got the chance to eat any of the leftovers because they were asking to eat them for dinner the next few nights.

Scones

A traditional afternoon tea offers scones and accompaniments on the middle tier of your serving tray.  For our Cinderella inspired afternoon tea, I knew I had to incorporate some sort of pumpkin scone recipe. I found this recipe for Maple Glaze Pumpkin Scones from Home is Where the Boat Is.  Wow!  These were awesome!  I made these ahead of time and stored them in the freezer until the day of the tea party.  Typically, scones are served with clotted cream and some sort of jam or jelly. But with the maple glaze, these scones didn’t require any sort of accompaniment.  This is definitely a recipe I would make again, and of course was a hit with the kiddos. 

Desserts

Now for the top tier of our serving tray (and final course)…desserts!  I decided to make two different offerings for dessert.  The first recipe I utilized was for Pumpkin Cheesecake Balls from Cakescottage.  This recipe was a little involved for me, I mostly struggled with keeping the melting chocolate at that perfect temperature for dipping the cheesecake balls.  If you have a double boiler, I think you will be much more successful than me!  I was guilty of letting the chocolate overheat *gasp* and then harden.  I’M NOT PERFECT, YOU GUYS!!!  I tried to salvage it by adding a little milk (which worked!) but didn’t create that beautiful solid white chocolate coating like the recipe called for.  I’m sure I could redeem myself if I attempted these babies again, but the kids loved them and they were all eaten up in a matter of days.

My last dessert offering was these adorable Pumpkin Tea Cakes from TeaTime Magazine.  This cake recipe was AWESOME!  I would absolutely utilize this recipe again for any type of cake or cupcake.  The cake came out moist and fluffy, and the cream cheese frosting was the perfect balance of sweet and tangy.  I decided to get creative with the mini cakes and try to cut them out in mini pumpkin shapes using a pumpkin cookie cutter.  They SORT OF looked like mini pumpkins haha.  The kids thought they were adorable nonetheless and I am very happy to have such a wonderful pumpkin cake recipe to use in the future.

The Cinderella Inspired Afternoon Tea Party turned out great and the girls really loved the special treat.  These types of occasions are almost as much fun to plan as they are to enjoy, and I hope that my kids will remember the fun we had for years to come. 

Do you love pumpkin as much as I do?  Do you have any favorite pumpkin dishes to make during this time of year?  Share them in the comments!

Check out our Snow White Inspired Afternoon Tea Party HERE and our Alice in Wonderland Mad Tea Party HERE!

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