Yesterday we took ourselves off in the morning to Hawkswick Lodge Farm just on the outskirts of St Albans. Yes, it’s pick-your-own season, and we came back having picked lots of strawberries, a fair few redcurrants and a small box of gooseberries. Recommended for a trip out – reasonable prices, delicious fruit, adequate car park, friendly staff and acres of fruit. The strawberries are even grown at waist height so you don’t need to bend down to collect them all.
Now, what to do with all of that fruit…

Fruits of our labours	Double, double…
The finished article	Jam packed

Recipe: 900g strawberries, 900g redcurrants, 2kg jam sugar, 3tbsp lemon juice. Put fruit and lemon juice in pan; add sugar. Heat and stir gently to draw out juice and dissolve sugar, then boil quickly until setting point reached. Pour into jars, cover and seal. Takes about 30 mins to prepare fruit then 45mins to heat.

Moo business cards.  That is all.

	Box of delights
Let’s meet!
	Laying my cards on the table

(Get them here)

In honour of Hotel Chocolat being one of the runners-up in the St Albans retailer of the year award, I thought I’d post a picture of the ‘Excellence 2008’ box from their Chocolate Tasting Club.

Click through the picture for descriptions.

For those of you who’ve not heard of the club, they send you, er, a box of chocolates to, er, taste. Hence the name.

I’ve stopped getting the boxes every month and now have them on a quarterly basis, but we do get the annual ‘best of’ box. And this one was a stonker. Not a single chocolate rated less than 9/10 (and there’s normally one or two that I’d score at around 6/10), an average of 9.4 and no fewer than five chocolates I rated at 10/10. Step forwards:

Red, White & Blue Best supporting fruit – white chocolate ganache mixed with redcurrants and blueberries, enrobed in a white chocolate shell.

Caramel Melt Most mellow – A firm praline brimming with earthy hazelnut, blended with an all natural essence of traditionally British caramel toffee enrobed in a silky smooth milk chocolate topped with a 100% cocoa swirl.

Dutch coffee Members’ choice – looks like a little chocolate coffee cup. Filled with ganache mixed with coffee and advocaat, topped with white chocolate lid and sprinkles of coffee.

Eton mess Best members’ creation – wish I’d thought of this one for the competition. Meringue with strawberry buttercream enrobed in white chocolate, topped with freeze dried strawberry pieces. Surely as close as you can get to real Eton mess in a chocolate?

Amaretti Creme Best dressed – amaretto creme in a dark chocolate topped with an amaretti biscuit. Shame one of mine was crushed in the post (very top right) but it tasted just as good!

Made you feel hungry yet?

Finally downloaded the pictures to follow up on last week’s video. And the darn rain meant they really weren’t very good. Here’s about the only one worth seeing:

A rainy day. Men, women and children dressing up as large puppets. What more excuse do I need to go try my Flip video out a little more? Needless to say – I should probably have written a properly timed script to record this 😉

Originally posted on tall-rich.vox.com