Along with flour, sugar, milk, baking powder, dried fruit and flaked coconut, these buns contain some ground flaxseed — because our test cook was out of raw eggs.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
Remembering generosity of 9/11/01
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“It’s quite good,” reporter and taste tester Jen Learn-Andes said as she sampled a Gander Tea Bun from the Times Leader Test Kitchen. “It reminds me of a scone.”
“It has a good flavor,” reporter Margaret Roarty said. “It would go well with a cup of hot coffee.”
“It’s OK,” page designer Ashley Bringmann said. “It’s not my favorite.”
While not everyone was a fan of the Gander Tea Buns, at least the ones I baked this week, (and, hmm, maybe that’s because of the ground flaxseed I used; more about that later) it’s hard to not like the story behind them.
The recipe came from Charlotte Gushue, who was a third grader in Gander, Newfoundland, when 38 airplanes were diverted to her remote hometown on Sept. 11, 2001, after U.S. air space was closed due to the terrorist attacks.
In a 2021 (20th-anniversary) article from the Christian Science Monitor, Charlotte remembered how, at her mother’s direction and not entirely willingly, she donated some of her own toys to comfort children among the stranded passengers.
Then she helped her mom bake fresh, home-made buns to help feed the passengers, and she believes that influenced her decision to become a professional baker.
I’ve become newly interested in reading about people like Charlotte’s family and other residents of Newfoundland who fed, sheltered, comforted, ran errands and tended to pets for the close to 7,000 airline passengers who were stranded there for five days.
Their generosity hadn’t been on my radar at all until I became aware that “Come From Away,” a touring musical about that time and place, will be at the Scranton Cultural Center for four shows, April 5-7. As a preview to the performances, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Tuerff, a one-time stranded passenger who later founded “Pay It Forward 911,” a charity that encourages people to be kind to strangers.
Tuerff, who is depicted in the show, said he has seen it 80 times and his favorite part is when his character begins a song that turns into a prayer for peace, in several languages. Sounds good to me.
Now, if you don’t mind switching gears from a topic as lofty as world peace to one as mundane as my efforts in the test kitchen, guess what? We had lots of eggs in our refrigerator, but during this post-Easter week all of them were either hard-boiled or preserved in the form of leftover hrudka (for more on that ethnic delicacy, see Mark’s April 3 test food column.)
Having no raw eggs on hand I decided to try a substitution from minimalistbaker.com. For each egg I mixed 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed with 2.5 tablespoons of water, and let it stand for 5 minutes before adding it to the batter.
Mark warned me not to do it (“Just go to the store for more eggs,” he advised), but I wanted to see how the flaxseed would work. I thought the finished buns turned out just fine. As did my mom, and Jen and Margaret from the newsroom and Mark when he eventually tried one. As for our neighbor Roger, who found and ate the bun I’d left on his porch, he said, “I loved it!” Music to my ears.
Now here is the recipe for tea buns, courtesy of Charlotte Gushue of Gander, Newfoundland.
Gander Tea Buns
2½ cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup coconut
1/2 pound butter (2 sticks)
1/2 cup sugar
6 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons custard powder (or corn starch or instant vanilla pudding)
1/3 cup chopped dried apricots
1/3 cup mixed fruit
2 eggs
3/4 cup milk
Put the first six ingredients in a bowl. Crumble together and add apricots and mixed fruit. Make a well and add eggs and milk. Mix lightly. Spread on floured board. Cut and place on a greased baking sheet. Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes.
