Seed & Bean: funky festival chocolate

Continuing on from my last post, here is another blog entry I did for YOU magazine. Yes, essentially re-blogging myself does make me a lazy blogger, but the sheer beauty and deliciousness of the chocolate makes up for that (I hope).

Gone are the days of the lowly humdrum chocolate bar. Now, it seems, chocoholics are on the hunt for the funkiest flavours and jazziest packaging and the latest offerings from Seed & Bean provide just that.

As the official chocolate bar of this year’s Glastonbury Festival and with packaging featuring the psychedelic retro designs of artist Matt Lyons, this is chocolate at its most stylish.

The smooth and delicious treats come in three flavours: Milk Chocolate with Cornish Sea Salt and West Indies Lime, White Chocolate Raspberry and Vanilla, and Dark Chocolate with Sicilian Hazelnut. The white chocolate option, which tastes like real raspberry ice-cream, was a big hit in the YOU office.

To top it all off Seed & Bean also have top eco credentials, as the UK’s only 100% ethically accredited chocolate company – even their wrapping is biodegradable!

At £2.29 each, these bars will be out in shops from September, but if you can’t wait until then you can find them online now, seedandbean.co.uk.

Foodie Festival (aka Gorge Fest 2013)

I am a fan of food; a big fan of food. In fact I’d go as far to say it’s all I eat.

So when a friend offered me a last minute ticket to the Foodie Festival at Clapham Common this weekend (8th-9th June) I almost bite her arm off at the invite!

With expectations high and stomachs empty we entered the maze of food stalls, bars, cookery showings, music and free samples. There were hundreds of stalls and pop-up restaurants serving dishes from across the globe – Indian platters, burritos, pizza, paella, sushi, BBQ, oysters and even battered fish from Poole, Dorset (woo!) to name just a few.

After all that there was dessert! Cakes, cheesecakes, mini shot-glass puddings, ice lollies, there was even one stall offering deep-friend sweets and another serving icecream made using liquid nitrogen. I had something called a Peanut Butter Fudge Cake which, despite possibly being all of my recommended daily amount of calories, was darn tasty (Narna’s Chocolates).

Oh and of course there was drink, a lot of drink – enough to pick up a mild drinking habit in one afternoon. You could even opt for a coconut freshly hacked open by a man wielding a machete in an uncomfortably blasé manner, (drinking straight out of a coconut will never get old).

Occasionally our attention was drawn away from the stalls and we were lucky enough to see Amber Rose cooking up a tasty looking cake from her book Love Bake Nourish in one of the theatre tents.

So, I may have eaten more than was physically necessary but I had a jolly good time doing it and it’s safe to say we were not disappointed.* Apparently there are a few festivals like this happening around the south of England, check out details on the Foodies Festival site.

*Well actually, it would have been great to have a little sunshine but I can hardly blame the festival organisers for the weather (…much).