Tiffin at the Langham-Sunday Chocolate Tea

I was always curious about the Sunday Chocolate Afternoon Tea at the beautiful Langham Hotel in Pasadena.  Everyone is familiar with Tea in the Afternoon at different hotels wherein they serve a variety of teas with little sandwiches and sometimes champagne is included.

Sandi's big birthday; can't divulge how big, was the reason for the celebration. The ambiance is unbeatable. In my opinion you pay mostly for the ambiance. There were 8 selections of tea; from green tea to pear caramel. Our party of 4 could pick 3 kinds. The pear caramel was likable, although I am not a tea expert, it was o.k. You could taste the pear and a hint of caramel. It would have been better if this was made into a mousse.

The champagne aka sparkling wine was very drinkable. We started with the Chocolate Tea Sandwiches. If you are wondering what kind they served......wonder no more. The first one was White Chocolate & Avocado Mousse with Vanilla Marinated Shrimp. Though good, if you didn't tell me what was in it, I wouldn't have been able to guess (except for the shrimp). It sounded much better than it tasted.
The second was Cucumber, White Chocolate Mint Mousse & Grapefruit. That was light and refreshing. The Smoked Salmon, Roasted Fennel & Cocoa Nib Mousse was very good and so was the Serrano Ham, Burrata Mousse with Chocolate Caviar. The tray also had a Dark Chocolate Mousse Profiterole with Chocolate Dust. That was delicious. There were 2 types of scones; chocolate chip and chocolate marble. Those scones were not worthy of being served let alone calling them scones. The so called scones were cake like in texture which crumbled when I applied the lemon curd.

There was an abundance of all sorts of chocolate including a chocolate fountain.  There were truffles, chocolate raspberry cupcakes, chocolate fruit tarts, white chocolate green tea panna cotta, white chocolate bark, chocolate macarons, chocolate passion gateau, Earl Grey milk chocolate truffle, etc. etc. We had too much chocolate. I really could have had more of the sandwiches, which we could have but we would have had to pay extra for them. This Sunday Chocolate Tea by the way cost $59.

We were all glad we did it but we would not do it again. It is one of those things one has to experience once.  They did present Sandi with a birthday treat. You guessed it.....more chocolate but with an addition of something yellow.

I suspect their regular tea might be more fruitful and I don't mean fruits.  We all had a nice time including the birthday girl and that's all that counts. The Langham Hotel is located at 1401 S. Oak Knoll Ave. in Pasadena, California.