The Easy Hack For Picture-Perfect Tea Sandwiches

Tea sandwiches are bougie little lunch bites linked to English high tea, garden parties, wine tastings, and other fancy affairs. They're not meant to be a hearty or filling meal. Instead, tea sandwiches are served alongside tiny cakes and tartlets, mini custards, and other small bite appetizers that will fill you up if you eat enough of them. Tea sandwiches are unique in the culinary world, made of crustless bread with a wide array of variants available. Make a version with ham, brie, and apple, or a watercress, cucumber, and butter combo. Use anchovies and crab, curried egg, or a combination of sweet butter, cream cheese, and fruit. The possibilities seem endless, but all tea sandwiches have one thing in common. They're meant to be adorable — in fact, a perfectly cute aesthetic is everything when it comes to tea sandwiches.

There's a secret to cutting a perfect tea sandwich, a hack that makes the process easier and leaves you with crustless, even edges — and it's a trick so easy, you'll wonder why you didn't think of it first. Lay out your bread in single slices on the table before assembling your sandwiches. Use a drinking glass to press a circle into every piece of bread. Then, use a knife to cut along the perfect circle mark made by the glass. Build your crustless tea sandwiches from there and cut them in half when you're finished for little half-circle party delicacies.

Making the perfect tea sandwiches is a daunting task, but the best place to start is learning the right way to prep bread for delicate tea sandwiches. After choosing the perfect type of fresh bread, all you have to do is select the ingredients to pair with your tea selection and other appetizers. Pair ingredients and different teas together to create a whimsical, themed afternoon tea party that your guests will appreciate. Pressing a drinking glass into bread to create a perfect circle is a great way to get circular sandwiches, but circles are just the beginning of the shapes available for tea sandwiches.

Cookie cutters leave a deep line in bread that can be traced, cutting your sandwiches into any kind of shape you can imagine. Some can even cut through the bread altogether, depending on the brand and the type of bread being used. You can find all sorts of shapes online, ranging from this basic collection of hearts, stars, and rectangles to butterflies, flowers, and even dinosaurs. There are also sandwich cutters and sealers that will cut your sandwiches and then press down the edges, sealing them with a pretty frilled pattern. Find classic round shapes or sandwich cutter and sealer contraptions in shapes like hearts and various types of animals.