Post-Hurricane Tea Party (Homemade Lemon Bars & Blueberry Black Tea)

My sister and I enjoying Homemade Lemon Bars & Blueberry Black Tea after Hurricane Irma. Find out what's so significant about this...

Last week was extremely intense because a very strong hurricane hit Florida where my family and I live! Thankfully we're all okay and we only got a small amount of damage to our home; broken fence, missing screens, lost shingles, but the thing I was the most upset about... all of the unripe ponderosa lemons being blown off of our tree! ;) I had been anxiously waiting all year for them to be ready for picking! A ponderosa lemon is a hybrid of a regular lemon and another type of citrus fruit called a citron. You can read more about them here!

One of the ponderosa lemons that fell off of our tree compared to a regular lemon.

Since I really had my heart set on making lemon bars with the juice from the ponderosa lemons, I decided to see what I could get out of them even though they fell off too early. Out of all of them I probably got about the amount of juice I would have normally gotten from just one! But that's still better than nothing, right? And it was more than enough to make one full batch of my go-to recipe, which you can get here!

                                           

One good thing that came from the storm was my sister's extended stay since all of her college classes were canceled during the hurricane and for the rest of the week! Once we got things mostly back to normal around the house, I put together a post-hurricane tea party to celebrate and to have some time to catch up with her! 

"When life gives you [slightly unripe] lemons... make lemon [bars, anyway]!"
Lemons falling off of a tree before they're completely ready is a very small problem compared to what others are going through because of the hurricane. So I decided that it would be meaningful to serve the lemon bars that I was still able to make as a way to remember how sometimes, even when seemingly bad things happen, it's probably not nearly as troublesome as the problems that other people are facing. Or it could just be that you haven't found a way to turn it into something good yet!

On a less serious note, for the tea party I decided to pair the lemon bars with blueberry tea because I love that combination! I remembered that I had a package of blueberry black loose leaf tea. It is one of my favorites because it has a wonderful aroma and the taste is so flavorful and delicious on it's own that I usually drink it without putting in any additional sweeteners (which is very unusual for me because I have a major sweet tooth)! For this tea party, however, I decided to use my lemon sugar because, like I said, I really love those two flavors together! I got both the tea and sugar that I used for this tea party from The Spice and Tea Exchange at Disney Springs. You can find out more about this store and their amazing products here!

You can see that we used blue and yellow dishes (and outfits!) to contribute to the blueberry/lemon theme! We both had a wonderful time being together and commemorating the end of the hurricane!