Review: Afternoon Tea at Moor Hall Hotel

To continue with the Christmas festivities, and one of my good friends, Liz being back in town for a few days, I booked us an afternoon of relaxing with tea and cake. The perfect way to catch up and have a gossip. The venue for the afternoon was Moor Hall Hotel, in Sutton Coldfield, pretty near where we both grew up. I don’t think however, either of us thought how perfect this venue would be for afternoon tea. We were led to our table through panelled hallways into a little alcove complete with 2 sofas and a roaring open fire. The big bonus – the little room was all ours. With gently playing Christmas music, festive decorations and the afore-mentioned fire, what more could you ask for? We chose their festive afternoon tea, which had a Christmassy twist on the traditional components. There was a small but interesting tea selection – I went for the Moor Hall Blend, whilst Liz had some Earl Grey. Our food arrived on a lovely traditional cake stand, with an extra plate of sandwiches as they couldn’t fit everything on! We had asked if we could swap out the mince pie for something else (I’m not very keen and Liz has had a lot already this Xmas…) and there were extremely obliging with this. We had 5 types of sandwiches – turkey & cranberry, smoked salmon lemon & dill, brie & red onion, cheddar & sweet pickle and egg & cress. All the sandwiches were enjoyable and pleasant, I partially enjoyed the salmon as the lemon & dill cream cheese had a lovely tang.   On the second layer up we had fruit scones with jam and cream, 2 little mini stollen bites, and spiced orange cupcakes. I wasn’t expecting to like the stollen – but I actually loved it! Lastly, the top layer – lots more little sweet treats including some rocky road, gingerbread christmas trees and a chocolate ganache torte in place of the mince pie. All delicious! We had a thoroughly enjoyable few hours, endless tea refills, good food in a perfect winter setting, an absolutely lovely waitress who kindly bought us a little festive gift of some loose leaf tea to take home and some foil to wrap up the bits we were too full to eat. There really was nothing we could begin to pick fault with. Full marks Moor Hall :) Happy Christmas!     Disclosure: we paid in full for our afternoon tea, apart from the festive gift they gave us, which was very kind of them.