Chocolate Cocktails, Popcorn, Sauce and Business Cards on my Kitchen Table

On my Kitchen Table is a post to share with you some of the products I've been sent to review over the last month, it's a rather eclectic mix this month so let's get stuck in!

First up are some summery chocolates from Hotel Chocolat.  The Tropical Cocktails are sweet and fresh with a little kick of alcohol.  There are four different 'cocktails' : Peach Bellini, Pina Colado, Hurricane and Caipirnha.  We both really liked the Hurricane with dark Jamaican rum truffle blended with zippy Valencian orange and passion fruit, they were all very tasty but the others were a little sweet for our taste.  I was a pack of Choc Fudge Sundae chocs, little chocolate pots filled with a sticky toffee and fudge sauce with intense praline and a sprinkle of crunchy cereal, absolutely delicious and a nice treat at at reasonable price.

Tropical Cocktails £10.00 for 115g 7/10
Choc Fudge Sundae £3.85 for 75g 9/10


Julian Metcalfe is obsessed with delicious and healthy food. Back in 2009 he was fed up of stodgy snacks that weighed him down and he wanted to create something that was light yet tasty to replace the bog standard crisp. Popcorn was the perfect fit and Metcalfe’s skinny Topcorn was born.  There's a new flavour of Metcalfe's skinny topcorn  it's white cheese and it's really really addictive! There are lots of other cool flavours too, from the simple salted popcorn to spicy and sweet flavoured popcorns. 8/10

75g Metcalfe's Skinny Topcorn - White Cheese £1.00 - £1.49

I remember my Mum had a little bottle of Tabasco Pepper sauce which she would use to add chilli heat to her cooking, fresh chillies were not easily available in my childhood and there was only one kind of Tabasco. Now Tabasco have launched a range of sauces to Transport Your Tastebuds, Louisiana Style



Vistaprint have a range of great products at reasonable prices which transform your photographs into books, calendars, mugs, t-shirts, phone cases.... in fact just about anything that will hold an image!  I was going to make a photo book as I have done previously and found them to be excellent, but I simply ran out of time. As  I needed some new business cards, I used the simple step by step instructions to create these cards featuring a recipe I made last summer.
250 Premium Glossy Business Cards : £26.81 including VAT 9/10

Many thanks to the PRs and companies for the samples to review, I was not paid for these reviews and all opinions are my own. 

Labels: Business Cards, cocktails, dipping, Hotel Chocolat, marinade, Metcalfe's Skinny, Popcorn, sauce, Tabasco, Topcorn, Vistaprint

posted by Janice @ 20:51 15 Comments

Foragers Fancy - A Gin Cocktail

Gin was probably my first 'grown up' drink, it seemed very sophisticated to ask for a gin and tonic rather than the Cinzano and lemonade that started my foray into alcoholic drinks.  Good grief, that dates me squarely in the 1970s!  However time moves on and I was seduced away from drinking spirits by the increasing quality, and reducing price, of wine.  However, recently in an attempt to drink less (lets face it, once the bottle is open....) we have turned our attention back to the hard stuff.

It started with the bottle of vodka which had been given to my husband as a gift, but vodka has never been my spirit of choice,  so when Martin Miller's offered me a bottle of their Arctic Quality Gin I was more than pleased to accept.

The bottle is really very beautiful and shows the UK and Iceland, as the gin is distilled in England and blended with Icelandic water.  I also received a glossy 'coffee table' book with more information than you could possibly want to know about Martin Miller's Gin and a cocktail recipe book.  In the book there are some nice little quotes from Martin Miller e.g " I want my gin to have the scent of Oriental flowers at dusk and to have the fragrance of orange groves on a warm night in Seville" probably my favourite chapter is the one called 'Gin, Janes and Jazz' which tells you about the birth of the 'Cocktail Hour' which replaced afternoon tea in the Grand American Hotels at the start of the twentieth century, shortly followed by prohibition in the 1920s which gave gin attitude!

The flavour of the gin is very clean. It doesn't have the harsh 'scented' quality that some other brands seem to  have.  It felt as if you could taste each of the individual botanicals that go to make up the flavourings for this gin: Juniper, Coriander, Angelica, Lime Peel, Liquorice Root, Cassia Bark and Florentine Iris and it was very smooth, no harsh spirity kick probably down to the way it is distilled with only the 'heart' of the spirit being kept.  Or maybe it has something to do with the pollution free Icelandic water.  All I can say is that it is a very good gin indeed!
 
Having tried the Martin Miller's Gin with tonic, I thought I would make a cocktail.  But rather than use one of the recipes provided by Martin Miller's  I decided to create my own cocktail:

Labels: blackberries, Bramble Cordial, Brambles, cocktails, Gin, ice, Martin Miller's Gin, mint

posted by Janice @ 19:31 8 Comments

Rhubarb and Ginger Zinger!

Urvashi Roe, The Botanical Baker, set a challenge for us foodie bloggers to come up with a Summer Cocktail.  I was inspired in my cocktail making by two particular blogs:  Chocolate Log Blog  where Choclette made a Rhubararella with homemade rhubarb shnapps and The Paupered Chef's Homemade Rhubarb Syrup and 'Rhubarb Daisy' 



I thought about making the schnapps, but somehow it was the Homemade Rhubarb Syrup that appealed to me.  The recipe is just sooooo easy: two cups sugar, two cups water, 6 or 7 stalks of rhubarb, washed trimmed and finely sliced.  Check out the method, also extremely easy, at The Paupered Chef.   I sterilised a jar and have been storing the glorious pink stuff in the fridge waiting for the weekend to come around again.

Rhubarb and Ginger Zinger

250ml Rhubarb Syrup
1 small orange
bottle of Crabbies Alcoholic Ginger Beer or a bottle of non-alcoholic ginger beer

 
1 slim stick of rhubarb
1 strawberry
some mint
cocktail stick or skewer

1. Cut the orange in half, squeeze one half and put the juice in the bottom of a tall glass. Cut a slice from the other half of the orange and make a cut into it so it will sit on the glass.
2. Take the stalk of rhubarb, split the top downwards with a knife several times until it starts to splay out, put it cut side down into a glass of iced water (this will help it to bend)
3. Pour 250ml Rhubarb Syrup into the glass
4. Top up with Crabbies AGB or, for a non-alcoholic cocktail, ordinary ginger beer.
5. Remove the rhubarb stick from the water, dry with kitchen paper and place with the 'flower' upwards into the glass.
6.Thread the strawberry and mint onto the cocktail stick or skewer (I used a bbq skewer and cut it to size) and lay across the top of the glass
7. Add the slice of orange and enjoy.

The rhubarb can be used to mix the ingredients before drinking, but it's fun to leave the layers of different ingredients showing when you serve.



Cocktails always make me think of the 1920s, so I thought I would share this photo I found when I was visiting my mum recently.  I would be about 19 and was part of a 'float' for the local festival parade.  My mother was always roping me into these things and the costume was really fun to wear.  CHEERS!

Labels: cocktails, Crabbies Alcoholic Ginger Beer, Ginger Beer, mint, orange juice, rhubarb, strawberry

posted by Janice @ 19:17 16 Comments