Girlie time!

This afternoon my friend Ana Kay, her cousin Kate, their friend Karen, and I all went for Edwardian Tea at the Spadina Museum. We got gussied up and arrived at the gorgeously restored Edwardian home of the Austin family, one of Toronto's upper-elite in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We had a table in a cozy corner of the sunroom, set with individual tea settings and a platter of assorted tea sandwiches, followed by another platter of cookies. We were offered 3 varieties of custom blends of tea named after memebers of the Austin family. I tried all three and ended up buying a little package of "Mary's Concert Blend" to take home.

After the tea, during which we mainly discussed who we thought were the hunkiest male actors in BBC adaptations of Romatic and Victorian era novels, there was a tour of the house itself. The house was donated to the city by the last member of the Austin family to live there. Although it needed a fair amount of restoration (one of the rooms required all the damask wallfabric to be remade to exactly match the original) all the furniture was donated along with the home. Some of it had to be restored, but it was wonderful to see the actual furniture instead of recreations. The furniture was all made by local furniture makers at the time, so it's good to see the Austin family being so economically and environmentally conscious. :)

My favourite part was the kitchen. I'm fascinated by antique kitchen equipment and this kitchen had it all. It had the original gas oven and the newer oven that the family bought in the 1930s, the ice cabinet that had to be filled with huge ice cubes in the summer to keep the meat from spoiling, and all the little kitchen gadgets that I love to look at at antique stores, including a wall-mounted hand-crank coffee grinder that has become one of my watch-for items when Nyron and I go antique shopping. I could have spent all day in there! I wish they taught cooking classes.

In short, I highly recomend the event, which they have a few times every fall. I wish they had it in the summer, since it would have been lovely to see the grounds, but it was worth the walk in the rain from the subway station.

o( )__