Pears and Pines Winter Brunch and Tablescape

For the last several years, we have had an annual Christmas tea with a couple of other mothers and daughters. We have a little "tea group", and we often visit our favorite local tea room (Smith Byrd Tea Room in Prattville) together. We had to cancel last year because one of the families had Covid, so we were all really excited to resume our tradition. We had a lovely brunch at Alinda's home the week before. I'm posting a picture of her brunch below, along with a link to her blog post about it. If you're not following her over at "The Work of Her Hands", you should! Her blog is a beautiful mix of entertaining, cooking, homeschooling, and inspiration! Here's the link to the Winter Wonderland tea she recently hosted for us. I'll just tease you with a couple of photos I took that day...

The meal itself was wonderful, but when she brought us each THREE scones, well you can only imagine our culinary delight!

Go take a look at her post and subscribe to her blog. You'll love it! Now back to my brunch!

I chose pears and pines for my theme since I was testing another couple of recipes for David and Beth at Smith Bird and the recipes had pear in them. I chose to use my pine china since I wanted a winter setting, and it was actually a few days after the New Year.

We live in the country surrounded by pine trees. I found this vintage 1950's pattern years ago and purchased the salad plates and cups and saucers. A few years later I found dinner plates. The pattern is called "Sierra Pines" by Sango. Although I have quite a few pieces, I still wanted to mix it up with my wedding china, "Palatial Platinum" by Mikasa. The pines pattern is a little more white than the ivory dinner plate, but that doesn't bother me one bit. I love that they were collected separately over the years, but they work beautifully together. 

I went bold and decided to place it all on my "wood" chargers by Better Homes and Gardens. They have a pinecone motiff, so I thought I'd go for the repeat. Even though the Mikasa pattern is a formal one, I like the look of combining them. The platinum and white make the tablescape somewhat icy in appearance, but the wood charger warms it up and adds an organic touch. You'll also notice I added some brass candlesticks and a woven runner down the middle which I then topped with a light gray runner. It all seemed to add depth to the silver and white. The napkins are vintage and came from a thrift store years ago.

Here you can see the silver trim on the pine salad plates ties them to the platinum band on the dinner plates. You can also see that the pinecones have a touch of brown color to them which picks up the brown chargers and table runner. The silverware is "Ribbon Edge Frost" by Gorham. 

I took another chance and mixed my stemware. The crystal is "Stephanie" by Mikasa. I don't know yet what the brown juice stems are, as I had just gotten them the day before. They belonged to my grandmother. My mother gave them to me. I liked adding yet another touch of brown to the table. It helped make it less formal, but I think it is still a quite elegant table.

At first I put down some similar votive holders, but in silver. However, Jewell and I both thought the gold worked better. I have had these for probably ten years. They came from Dollar Tree. I use them all the time! To keep them in top shape, I don't put my candle directly inside. I use a tealight in a tealight holder. The pine branches are artificial. I got them at Hobby Lobby several years ago. I love adding them to my decorations since we live in the middle of a million pine trees! It adds to the authenticity of my decorations.

I had some pears in the fridge, so I added them to the tablescape. I love the little pop of green from some of the pears. And the gold bosc pears just add to the golden brown accents on the table. I love mixing fresh and faux elements.

Jewell and I also decided to add the brass candlesticks and tapes. She felt (and I agreed!) that the table needed a little height, however, it's not as distracting as a large floral arrangement. We basically looked through them. Jewell and my niece found these sweet "baby" pinecones for me several years ago in our front yard. I baked them to kill any critters and then lightly sprayed them with some gold paint. You can see my process for baking pinecones here. The ones in this post were then flocked instead of painted, but the process is the same. I have been able to save these and reuse them for several years!

Now on to the food! Our first course was my sausage and kale soup with sweet potatoes. I'll share the recipe soon.

Next we had mini chicken balls, egg salad, ginger marmalade tea sandwiches, and a winter salad with pear vinaigrette. All recipes (except the tea sandwiches) will be up soon. The ginger marmalade sandwiches were another test recipe for Smith Byrd...and they are my newest OBSESSION! I can't wait for the cookbook to come out so you can try their delicious recipes! 

I served a ginger-pear mocktail with our meal. Check back soon for details!

Finally, we had ginger and pear scones with lemon curd and clotted cream. This was another of the recipes I was testing for the tea room, so I can't share the recipe, but they were delicious! We had spiced pear tea from Smith Byrd Tea Room with our scones. It was a delicious pairing!

I hope you enjoyed this look at my latest brunch! I'll try to begin blogging the recipes next week.