Strawberry Chocolate Xmas Tree
Pintrest is oooooh so PINTERESTING!!! I just love the things that you find on there. You should join it. I found this tree pinned by one of the people I follow and I knew that I just had to try it. I got the recipe/ instructions from Can’t Stop Making Things it’s a very interesting site, you should stop by.
The original recipe asked for chocolate chips but because foodie in the desert is all about making things more accessible and easier for all of you to make I used normal Cadbury’s milk chocolate. I reckon if you used chocolate chips or dark chocolate it would really be tasty but this is more expensive and less accessible to most
Don’t you just love how it looks??? It will make a great centre piece for your X-mas lunch/dinner. HAPPY MAKING!!
INGREDIENTS
- 300 gms chocolate of your choice (I used Cadbury’s milk)
- 750 gms strawberries (Make sure they vary in size, large, medium, small)
- A party hat
- Wax paper or baking parchment
- A plate or flat surface
METHOD
- Wrap the party hat with the parchment/wax paper. Fasten with tape. Fill the inside of the hat with old newspaper to make it steady and place it on a plate or cake base.
4. Now place the base of the strawberry in the chocolate then place it on the already prepared “party hat”. Make sure you start with the largest
me trying to get the job done
5. Once you get to the top apply chocolate on the tip then put the remaining chocolate into a plastic bag, snip a very small hole at the corner and pipe a few stars onto a wax paper, put it into the fridge till it hardens,
6. remove from the wax paper carefully and use more extra chocolate to stick the stars onto the tree.HAPPY EATING!!!!
Never EVER Buy This Brand of Coconut Milk
Cheap is expensive.
VERY EXPENSIVE.
How many times have you been told that? But do you listen? NO.
I know cheap is expensive. In fact most time I will not buy cheap brands but sometimes the Kikuyu in me just can not resist what SEEMS like a bargain. The key word there is SEEMS.
So a couple of months ago as I was doing my usual shopping for coming back to Kakuma. Remember when you would shop before boarding school? Yes it’s more or less the same, 2 soaps, 3 tissues, quencher juice, tooth paste, blueband etc. Anyway I digress back to my shopping. I always get coconut milk so when I got to them I noticed there was a new brand. As we all know coconut milk is not cheap some go for as much as 350 a can. For a girl who needs at least 5 that adds up to at least 1500 shillings. So when I saw one that cost about 200, do not remember the exact price just that it was around 100 shillings cheaper than most, I got very curious.
So in my head I wondered why it was so much cheaper. But again I rationalized that coconut milk is coconut milk. You know the way canned sweet corn is canned sweet corn and canned mushrooms is canned mushrooms. I told my self that it can’t be that bad maybe just a little bit lighter but boy was I wrong.
So I picked my 5 cans of KENTASTE coconut milk. WORST MISTAKE EVER!! GOSH!! First time I cooked with it my food tasted funny, so I said maybe it the spices second time same thing and the smell was also not that appealing. So I decided to open one can and just look at it and when I smelled it, it smelled like chemicals. So I opened a can of another brand don’t remember which one and the difference was ALARMING. So I poured out the Kentaste. I put the thought at the back of my head till a few months ago when I was visiting a friend. I was going to cook so I carried my ingredients and found that they had Kentaste but thank God I had carried my own coconut milk on explaining the difference and showing them my friend agreed.
Now yesterday, after like 4 months, I decided to make Mahamris. I remembered the Kentaste and thought that maybe I could use that coz the flour, sugar and cardamom would surely mask the taste. I opened a can and felt sick immediately. I was a punget annoying disgusting eeeew smell with a hint coconut. So what I decided not to use it. I opened a can of Royal Umbrella Coconut milk and WOW what I got was a nice rich coconut smell that was pure white.
If you look at the photo below closely you can actually see the difference in colour.
Royal Umbrella is a rich white color while Kentaste looks diluted. To be honest the smell of Kentaste on its own and in food is really disgusting so I poured it out.
Do not buy it. Yes it cheap. Yes it Kenyan. We would love to support local industries but they also need to step up and give us good quality products that compete well with the rest.
PLEASE NOTE
I am not marketing Royal Umbrella it is not the coconut milk I always use, its just what I had yesterday. They have not paid me to advertise them nor has anyone paid me for this review. I am not saying you should use Royal Umbrella just that you SHOULD NOT use KENTASTE. The opinions on this post are MY OWN
November Foodie Penpals
So sometime in October as I was browsing around and moving from one blog to another, I ended up at a cookie and cupcake blog (don’t remember the name) the blogger of this site had just participated in her first Foodie Penpals and it looked ooh so exciting. This post led me to the Lean Green Bean. And here I was excited some more. I just had to start the program in Kenya.
So I spoke to Lindsay of the Lean Green Bean and I was given a go ahead of copying the program and starting one in Kenya. So basically how it works is you receive penpal who you send a parcel of food items to and you also receive a parcel of food from someone, a stranger!!! how exciting!!!Read about the program and how to sign up here
Well I can say that the first month has not been so bad. We had a few issues with a few people being confused by who their penpal was. This is because initially we were an odd number and I had to allocate one person two penpals, so they send to one and receive from one. This caused a whole lot of confusion. I hope to fix this next month.
Well my penpal sent me homemade M&M cookies, they were delicious. I ate some gave some out. They were nice and crunchy not too sweet.
I also got some Doritos, green Thai curry paste and coconut milk. Can’t wait to cook me some Green Thai chicken curry 🙂
I sent a parcel to Emma, visit her blog to see what I sent her.
Read about the other bloggers experiences below.
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