Hot Chocolate Dippers - edible Christmas gift

I made a selection of edible gifts for my friends who were visiting just before Christmas and last year saw a few bloggers made these hot chocolate dippers; this year I've also seen them on sale in shops and thought how much cheaper it is to make your own!

The idea is simple- a block of chocolate, perhaps flavoured, on a stick that you use to stir a mug of hot milk. As the chocolate melts, your hot milk turns into hot chocolate!

You can make the dippers any shape; filling an ice cube tray with melted chocolate is a simple approach though I would recommend you use a silicon ice cube tray or you may have trouble getting the chocolate out!

I used these mini sweet moulds I bought a while ago from Lakeland; I ordered them from the website and they were smaller than I thought so I hadn't found anything to use them for yet. They were perfect for these chocolate dippers!

After you have melted the chocolate and added any flavouring, such as peppermint essence or if you are brave, a few dried chilli flakes - pour it into your mould. Place in the fridge for a few minutes and before the chocolate is hard but when it has begun to set a little, insert your stick. I used a cake pop stick which you can buy in most places quite cheaply these days (eg Poundland) but you could also save and wash ice lolly sticks if you plan that far ahead!

Return to the fridge until set then package up attractively to give as a gift.

As I mentioned these are cheaper than the shop bought ones and make a nice low-cost gift I am sharing them with Credit Crunch Munch, hosted by Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.

I'm also sharing this with Treat Petite, hosted by Kat at the Baking Explorer and Stuart at Cakeyboi, as they have a Christmas theme this month.

 

 

Chocolate Croissants or Pain au Chocolat

 

I have a breadmaker, which I don't use often enough - it never seems a good idea when I'm trying to follow a Slimming World diet and because I live on my own (with my cat... which makes me sound like an old spinster!) I feel like I'd never get through a whole loaf of bread before it goes mouldy. So the breadmaker stays gathering dust in the corner of my kitchen....

 

.... until this weekend, that is! My parents were staying and, inspired by a few different blogging challenges, I decided to make some pain au chocolat for breakfast.

 

I followed the instructions in the booklet that came with my breadmaker, which were pretty straightforward. Place the following in the breadmaker:

 

1/2 tsp yeast

300g strong white flour

1 tsp sugar

25g butter

1/2 tsp salt

1 egg

150ml water

 

And put on to the appropriate setting - in this case "basic- dough- 2h 20". And press start! (Yes I know it's a bit of a cheat....)

 



 

This makes you a lovely ball of dough. Unfortunately that's not the end of it and there's still a lot to do!

Roll out your dough

Dot the top third with butter

Fold the bottom third up to the middle and the top third down to the middle like so. Cover and chill in the fridge for 30 mins.

Roll out again and repeat the process with the butter and folding and chilling.

Divide the dough into four

Cut each square into triangles. They are quite small at this stage. You're supposed to now roll out each triangle to make it bigger, but I found that very difficult to do while retaining the triangular shape, so ended up just stretching them out a little with my fingers.

It's amazingly easy to make these look like proper croissants - at least it is easy in principle! My dough was quite soft so it doesn't look very neat. All you do is roll up the triangle starting from the wide edge, finishing at the point, then bend it into a curved shape.

I wanted to make some of my croissants into pain au chocolat, and used these Cadbury's Chocolate Chunks

 

I placed a chocolate chunk onto a piece of pastry before I rolled it up

 

 

Here they are, ready to prove then go in the oven. The only downside is that this whole process takes so long- 2 hours 20 to make the dough, an hour of chilling plus time to roll it out - then 20 minutes to prove and 15 minutes to cook, that there was no way I was going to do this first thing in the morning before breakfast! So I made the croissants right up to this point then left them in the fridge overnight. Luckily it didn't seem to do them any harm!

 

 Now (or the next morning)allow to prove in the oven at 40C for 20 minutes, until they have doubled in size.

 

 

Brush with beaten egg or milk. Cook at 220C for 15 minutes until browned. I can't believe this look like proper croissants, I assumed they were really hard to make but they are not at all*!

* Provided you use a breadmaker

 

 

 

Here you can see the chocolate in the middle. These were delicious!

 

The theme for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge is breads or yeasted sweet dough bakes that incorporate chocolate, so these fit perfectly. The challenge this month is hosted by Franglais Kitchen and originally comes from Chele at Chocolate Teapot and Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog.

 

 

Calendar Cakes, hosted by Laura of Laura Loves Cakes and Rachel of Dolly Bakes, came up with a bit of a different theme for their challenge this month, of bread, rolls and buns, so I am also sending them these chocolate croissants.

 

Finally here's a challenge I've not taken part in before: Breakfast Club, run by Helen of Fuss Free Flavours, and this month hosted by Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog. November's theme is chocolate!

 

 

 

 

More 30th birthday albums

As soon as I gave Alice her birthday album, all my friends started clamouring for one. One asked me outright if I would do one for her birthday too, and I had to admit that I had already started working on it!

I really enjoyed making them - choosing the photographs and picking out embellishments, and remembering all the good times we had had. Each album did take several hours and probably cost a fair bit, given how many stickers, embellishments and other bits and pieces I bought for each one, but it was well worth it.

As you can see with these, I made the covers look similar, but used different colour schemes. I also tied a piece of ribbon through the spiral binding.

With the page below, a picture of me with one of my friends at another friend's wedding, I wanted the picture to be the main focus. We are wearing green dresses so I went for a pale green background, with some outline stickers in the corner (for a more classic rather than colourful modern effect) and a transparent sticker with the words "lifelong friends" across the top. I'm on the right in the photo by the way, I can't believe how young I look - but it was about 8 years ago!

This picture was taken while we enjoyed a jacuzzi in a hotel swimming pool. I remember the photo was taken by the waiter who brought us our drinks - we weren't supposed to have drinks near the pool, I wonder how we managed to persuade him?!

I used some leftover lettering stickers from a recent birthday card (see the previous "Cards for men" post) to spell out "water babies" and added a couple of sticky metallic blue flowers. The page also has a blue background, in keeping with the water theme - all of it was thought through!

Can you recognise me in the photo? He he....

This picture was from my friend's wedding. I used some dome stickers with love and wedding wording and a foam heart, along with what I considered a romantic colourscheme for the background. Sorry the photo is sideways!

Incidentally every album had a lot more photos than this - I think there were about 20 pages - but I am only including a few of them here. See the previous post for more information on how and why they were made.

In the example below, I used two photos from a party where my friend was doing some very impressive karaoke. I went for a jazzy-colured background, a 3D "star" sticker and some musical notes.

This page was to remind my friends of a really fun girls' holiday we had in Croatia. The background paper is the colour of sunset (roughly when this photo was taken, as we were going out for the evening) and as well as the sun sticker, I stuck on a little cocktail umbrella, the kind you get in drinks. Of which I think we had plenty!

This is from the same holiday and as the pages were adjacent in the scrapbook, I used the same background paper. The two main embellishments are really cool - they are sticky, but designed to look like bottle tops, and were actually made of metal. They were printed with different holiday messages or pictures and I think came in a pack of six.

This picture is from one of the girl's hen nights, where some people had a surfing lesson. I bought a packet of Jolie's stickers on a surfing theme and, unsurprisingly, used a blue background with a swirly pattern (which you can't quite make out in this photo) to represent waves and the sea.

And here is the lovely hen getting married! I kept this page quite simple, and used a purple background to reflect the colours of some of the guests' dresses. I added a big "love" 3d sticker and a "friends forever" sticky ribbon across the button.

I am on the left in this photo, laughing because the heel of my shoe got stuck in the grass!

30th birthday scrapbooks

For my best friends'30th birthdays I wanted to give them something special. After getting into card making and buying Creativity magazine, I realised that scrapbooking could be a fun extension of my hobby and a good way to create a more personal present. I decided to put together a little album of photos and memories from the almost two decades we had known each other. My friends have kindly given me permission to put these photos on my blog.

I bought a blank cardboard ringbound album from Ebay, which I think was 10x8 inches - plenty big enough for a photo plus some embellishments per page. I really liked the front cover, below. I covered the cardboard cover with purple paper, used cardboard letters to spell out my friend's name and added two types of butterfly embellishments- die-cuts and rather fancier 3D ones. I also put two pieces of sticky ribbon along the bottom.


Inside the album I included a selection of photos going right back to our school days. I'm not going to put them all up here, but here are a few examples. In this one below, I used a selection of girl friend-related transfer words but allowed the photo to be the focus of the page.

Not every page contained a photo. Here I made a pocket by cutting a piece of card diagonally so it would take up half the scrapbook page and stuck it along the bottom two edges to make a pocket. I covered both the page underneath and the pocket with the same patterned paper. I edged the pocket with sticky ribbon and made a gift tag to slip inside. It says "I like bees" as my friend had just taken up bee-keeping and at the time, her entire "about me" section on Facebook said "I like bees"!

I was very excited to be able to include a picture of my friend's baby in the album. For this page I chose a pink patterned background, stuck on a selection of buttons that I bought on Ebay, and used my X-Cut die-cutting machine (which was quite expensive - about £40 - but came with a bunch of stencils including alphabet letters, which I have used quite a lot) to make the words "cute as a button". She really is!

This is the back cover of the album, covered in the same paper as the front with lots of die-cut butterflies in different pastel shades. I also have several sheets of "handmade by Caroline" stickers that I ordered via Ebay. I think my friend was really pleased with her gift!

30th birthday cards

My school friends and I turned 30 in 2009 and I wanted to make an extra effort with their birthday cards. I also turned my hand to a new branch of papercraft for the first time - scrapbooking - to make each of them a special gift, which you will read about soon.

In the meantime here are a couple of the birthday cards I made. The first one was on a 'spa' theme. I started with a larger-than-usual A5 card and a printed piece of paper (downloaded from a card making website then printed on my computer) that had '30' all over it. As the background was pink, I then took a piece of pink paper and edged it with a gold outline border. The spa stickers were all from the same pack by Jolie (a popular brand - a bit more expensive but the stickers are either good quality card with extra embellishments like little gems, or sometimes felt). I also used a gold outline sticker saying 'happy birthday' and put that on the same pink paper with gold edging.

This card was for another friend's 30th. She and her husband had recently bought a campervan so when I came across a camper van rubber stamp I decided to make that my theme. To begin, I divided the card in half and stuck pink paper on the bottom half, and covered the join with a piece of sticky ribbon. I used the rubber stamp and pink ink to stamp the camper van across the bottom, and I also downloaded and printed a picture of a pink camper van, which I matted onto another piece of pink paper to stand out.
The '30' embellisments are from a packet of table confetti; it seemed a good way of getting lots of shiny pink '30's but it turned out that they were very hard to stick! Also in the confetti pack were several pieces saying 'flirty thirty' but these weren't much easier to stick on!
As I final touch I added some small bee stickers as my friend had recently taken up bee keeping - cool hobby!