Lush Easter Wishlist

Even though I am a HUGE chocolate fan and love everything there is about Easter, well who doesn't love eating chocolate for breakfast, there are one or two other things that I always have my eye and currently there are a few items from Lush that I rather like the look of and here they are in the form of a wishlist:

1 - The Golden Egg Bath Bomb - said to turn your water gold and is a combination of a Bath Bomb so you get the fizzing and a Bath Melt so you get some luxuriously moisturising oils to make your skin lovely and smooth.  Costs £3.50

2 - The Immaculate Eggception - Another Bath Bomb which comes in either yellow or pink and these are rather special because there is not just one bath bomb there are and when you crack them open you will find either a yellow chick of a white bunny!  Cost £6.95

3 - Rose - This one is a bubble bar and  it is made using Turkish Rose Absolute and promises to create a tonne of bubbles.  Costs £2.95

4 - Secret Garden - A bath bomb which is said to be full of flowers and the scent of spring which will create serene and tranquil bath that will bring you back to life.  Costs £2.95

5 - Bunch of Carrots - These caught my eye because they are quirky and something a little bit different.  Once you have them, you swish one of the carrots around your bath to enjoy soft clouds of bubbles and tropically scented water. They are also said to be reusable bubble bars and do not smell of carrots.  Cost 5.95

If you are not too sure what to buy when going into Lush, there is always an option to get a gift set which will contain a few items to make your options less traumatic.  As it is Easter Lush have two offerings which are:

6 - Funny Bunny - This gift set is sold in a Knot wrap and contains 4 items from the Easter Range and it costs £20

7 - Carrot - This gift set comes in the shape of a carrot which is really quirky and contains 4 products from the Easter range and costs £16.95

Finally:

8 - Madame Butterfly - This is a bubble bar on a stick, anyone who is familiar with the Christmas range will possibly have had one of these already, though in the form of an Angel.  With the bubble bar on a stick, like with carrots, you swish it around in your water as the bath runs and it creates Rose and Lemon scented  bubbles.  Costs £5.25

So there you have a little Lush Easter Wishlist and a nice alternative to chocolate.  Have you tried any of these products?

The Haagen-Dazs Easter Master-class

Whenever an email pops into my inbox and mentions chocolate I get excited! I am a huge chocoholic and I also love ice-cream so there was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to attend this masterclass.

When Kimberley and I turned up in Leicester Square we were greeted really warmly and handed some champagne (how perfect) and told how the evening would go and what we would be doing, you can only imagine the size of the grin on my face when I was handed an apron incase things got messy!

The blurb in the email read:

"Join us for an evening of discovery with acclaimed food stylist, writer and presenter, Phil Munday.  Experience the passion, craft and inspiration behind his latest ice-cream creation, the limited edition Haagen-Dazs Easter Egg, exclusive to the Leicester Square store from 22nd March"

We saw how Phil created the chocolate Easter egg using chocolate and a mould and then how he transformed it into something I just wanted to frame rather than eat.  Using ice-cream, some sorbet and one or two toppings, Phil managed to create this amazing, perfect work of art, talking us through how he did it.  Then it was our turn!

We had a menu of 8 different ice-creams and sorbets to choose from, the menu of which you will see above and the idea being you choose an ice-cream to fill the chocolate egg, naturally all of the ice-cream was Haagen-Dazs and then you needed to choose something to go with it to make it look decorative.  Before all of that we got to decorate our plates, which is easier said then done when you are not very artistic, but I managed it as the photos show.

So I choose salted caramel ice-cream to fill my mould and then I made a hole within which to place my chosen sorbet, I opted for Raspberry and boy do those two flavours go well together and then we had an endless choice of extra toppings to choose from to get really creative and my effort is shown below.

Obviously after all that hard work there is only one thing left to do - eat it!  yes we got to eat our very own creations after they had been photographed and boy did I enjoy it.

If you want to try out this delicious Haagen-Dazs Easter creation it will be available until 25th April 2014 at the Leicester Square restaurant. 

What do you think of my Haagen-Dazs Easter Egg creation? What would you have chosen?

Chocolate that is GOOD for you??

Easter is coming and every time I walk into a shop or a supermarket I am faced with a zillion different eggs to choose from.... but...Imagine if you could eat chocolate that was good for you and was only 72 calories!! Well you can! I was recently asked if I would like to try some from the Ohso range, not one I have heard of, but I am a chocoholic, so I gladly accepted. 

 A few days later, in this lovely and very different packaging came the chocolate. Inside I found one bar of orange flavoured chocolate bar and a whole pack of 7 original chocolate bars. Before getting to the bars themselves, there was also a really handy information card which gave a little more information on the range.

What they say

At last, a guilt free chocolate bar that loves your tummy….ohso probiotic chocolate bars (available in original and orange flavours), made from 53% delicious Belgian chocolate are clinically proven*  to be three times more effective at delivering your daily probiotics than a yoghurt drink  – and at only 72 calories a bar!

Each no added dairy, gluten, wheat and nut free,  individually wrapped bar is designed to provide you and your family with the optimum daily amount of probiotic to help support your digestive health, restoring the bacterial flora of good bacteria in your gut to help improve immunity and overall health and wellbeing. 

*Based on the survival rates of probiotics passing through the stomach to the small intestine, it was found that the survival rates in the probiotic yoghurt matrix were three times lower than in chocolate .  Source: Ghent University, Belgium

Well if I can eat chocolate and there are only 72 calories, does that mean it won’t taste as good as my favourite Mint Chocolate Aero Bar?  Well it actually tastes so much better than I thought I would and I quickly devoured the orange flavored bar before promptly hiding the pack of 7 so I could eat them all to myself.  Actually that isn’t quite true, I have been having them as a little extra treat in my packed lunches for work, instead of putting in a penguin (old school) or buying some chocolate because I need a quick fix, Ohso have provided me with just that and it is the perfect size to fit into my bag.  But taste is naturally quite important in any food products and when you bite into these bars, the first thing you notice, especially with the orange version is how natural the orange taste it and the chocolate, which is made from 53% dark Belgian chocolate is simply divine, it melts on your tongue

So as well as being gluten, nut, wheat and cholesterol free and contains no added dairy, Ohso also contains plenty of what is referred to as "good for you" which is proven to be three times more effective at delivering your daily probiotics than a yoghurt drink bacteria and if you look at this diagram shown below, you can read more about how good for you Ohso is:

That is not all, with Ohso, you can subscribe to it and it is available in 7-bar weekly packs for convenience and it is delivered to your home via Royal Mail, now the good thing about this is that the packaging is so good, it fits through your letterbox, as shown in the photo below, so there is no need to have to go and collect it from anywhere.  If you are not wanting to subscribe you can get Ohso from Harvey Nichols Food Halls, Ocado, The Nutri Centre, Amazon and health food stores and independent retailers nationwide.

For more information on Ohso on Twitter see @Ohso_Chocolate