More wedding craft updates plus hot chocolate

Last newsletter I gave some wedding craft updates and said I would tell you about the Sweet As Hutt Hot Chocolate Challenge as well as some other things. This newsletter, I'm basically going to go through each thing and let you know what's changed!

This includes:

• updates on the portraits and jewellery for the wedding

• a sneak peak of what I've used the skulls for

• my thoughts on some hot chocolates.

Wedding portraits and jewellery update

Last newsletter I posted portrait sketches that I was going to use in my wedding. I'm continuing to do these, still have a few more to go. What they're being turned in to has been taken over by my fiance as I'm running out of time and energy, but what he's done looks amazing. Much better than what I would have done anyway. But that will have to be a surprise for after the wedding.

I also showed you my collar/necklace and gloves I made. I was pretty excited at the time. But, I've got a surprise now - I don't like either of them with my dress and I'm going to try and replace them. Luckily the chain part of the necklace should either be an easy remake or adjustment of what I already have. The gloves will probably be replaced with bracelets which will also be easy except I'm thinking it needs fabric wrist bands which I need to actually sew. Big sigh. I'll get around to it and hopefully will look ok...

Very cool skulls remain cool

The skulls I showed last time have been used on several items, but I'm just going to tease one as an example. This is unfinished, and I won't say what it's going to be, but I think it looks pretty cool even now!

• 

• 

• 

Sweet As Hot Chocolate

Last year I gave my thoughts on some of the Sweet As Hot Chocolate entries (a challenge where Lower Hutt cafes make fancy hot chocolates). I made a real effort to try a bunch last year and only managed 5. This year I almost wasn't going to try any (want to fit into my wedding dress!) but decided I could have the treat. I ended up trying 3, which is 2 - 3 more than I thought I'd get!

• Triple Glory from Mariana's Kitchen. Going to be honest - super disappointing. I wouldn't necessarily chose this one to try first, as I like trying to more weird/interesting ones, but I figured this would be a really good classic hot chocolate. Instead, it was a super cheap tasting/bland/basic hot chocolate that wasn't very hot at all because the cream cooled it down too much. Usually cream will cool it to a drinkable temperature but I think they must not have had it hot enough to begin with. Dropping the bombs in made it taste a bit better, but since they were filled with oats you ended up with a weird oat sludge in your cup. It didn't really make sense. Finally, those bombs tasted better on their own than they did in the drink.

• Caramel Cheese Hug from Sierra. The caramel and cream cheese tasted soooo good and this kind of flavour is right up my alley. The cookie was really nice too. The actual hot chocolate was fine - definitely good, but to be honest is just the sort of good that I think should be baseline normal/decent hot chocolate (but for some reason baseline normal seems to be warm hardly flavoured milk?). So my only critique is the actual hot chocolate part wasn't super stand out. But a very nice hot chocolate overal.

• Twenty Eight to try the Banoffee hot chocolate. I was excited about this one firstly because it's one of the more interesting/weird flavours, but also because they won both People's Choice and the overall winner from the Judges last year. Last year and this year I can confirm - the actual base hot chocolate is GOOD. Such a low bar, in my opinion, but still, at least this place delivers. This hot chocolate was nice and the banana caramel flavour was nice, however - I don't think the flavour was strong enough! In their defence, I COULD taste it (again, low bar - but I've had many 'flavoured' hot chocolates where you couldn't taste the flavour at all!). Later that day I stumbled across the Cookie Time Banana Caramel cookie (which I think had been released too early at a local dairy - it hadn't been advertised at the time). That cookie had the banana taste AND caramel taste that I was expecting from Twenty Eight. Side note, I haven't tried the Fix and Fogg Banana Caramel butter yet as my local supermarket never has it - do you think it will be as good as the cookie?

That's it! Not too bad considering I'm scrambling to write this the day before it's due (not like me - but again, wedding planning/crafting is time consuming!).