revelling in misery

I got quite excited last night when I found a giant revel in my bag of Revels. It could be anything, I thought. Maybe it's a giant Malteser, or a big caramel. Or maybe it's solid chocolate all the way through (remember when someone at school had an all chocolate Kit Kat stick? Those were the days...)

Suffice to say, I was very excited as I bit into it. But was it a Malteser? Was it a caramel? No. It was a massive coffee sweet.

Livid.

Use your loaf

Drinking our drinks sometimes just isn't enough, and Rose got in touch to show us how she's getting creative with her bread making.  For example, the dough on the left was made using some of our blackberies, raspberries and boysenberries smoothie as well as other essential ingredients.  The end results can look like this :

 

This is no half-baked idea, so if you want to rise up to the challenge check out Doodle Bread where you can treat yourself to one of Rose's special bread making kits.  Perfect when you don't want to loaf around during the holidays. Oh yeast.

when life hands you lemons

 

Take magic sweets.

Tansy brought in some of those new fangled tablets that make sour things taste really, really sweet.

6 willing volunteers, a bagful of lemons and a thirst for knowledge - let the taste sensation commence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tansy didn't have a magic sweet.

 

 

So we ate her quota instead.

espresso in your pocket

This is Ceri's shelf. I walk past it every day but only stopped to have a good look for the first time yesterday. It includes a plaster of paris jaw cast, a plastic owl post-it note holder thing, a sheep with a biro leg, a porcelain Welsh Lady and my favourite item of all; Pocket Espresso To Go (by the same people that brought you Ferrero Rocher would you have it).

About the same size as those little packets of margarine you get with inflight meals, it's the answer to anyone in need of a pocket size caffeine hit on the go. With it's own tiny straw, how cute is that. The Ambassador is really spoiling us now.

apple do nicely

Apples are hard to come by in Ethiopia. Due to the dry conditions and limited water supply, not many people grow them. Most of the time, they tend to be imported from South Africa and are extremely expensive. For example, 1kg of apples costs well in excess of an average day's pay.

 

However, with the support of the innocent foundation, International Development Enterprises (IDE-UK) are helping to set up apple farms across Ethiopia - providing small family run farms with additional income, improving their livelihoods and making apples readily available for all.

IDE-UK provides low cost irrigation systems to farmers, sets them up with robust seedlings and trains them in apple husbandry (looking after the trees, growing the best fruit and so on).

In the world of apples, patience is a virtue/necessity as it takes up to three years for the trees to produce a decent crop. One challenge in particular to producing well formed apples is stopping the beaks of pesky birds pecking away at the fruit.

Abebe knows all about birds. Him and his family were one of the first to plant apple trees and last year, their first crop yielded over 300kg of fruit (that's roughly enough to apple up around 4,000 smoothies). 

Abebe was then able to sell the best apples at market and as well as being able to support his family with the money he made, he's now growing his business by buying even more apple seedlings to plant.

 

Lewis from IDE-UK has just come back from visiting the Wolmere and Ejere districts of Ethiopia where he took these photos (unfortunately, it's the wrong time of year to see shiny red apples on the trees).

Abebe is just one of 226 farmers that IDE-UK and the innocent foundation have helped in this way.

Talk about getting to the core of the issue.

(Posted by Ruvan)

vegetable vision

Those of you who have ever tried our tasty new veg pots might have noticed the veg art photos decorating the inside of the label. We've got a bit of an ongoing competition with those photos, if you add your best vegetable based photos to this flickr group we'll then print our favourites inside our veg pots. Meaning you get your creative excellence in front of thousands of people. The only guidelines being that your photo should show beautiful vegetables, and also have a slight sense of humour.

Here's a few examples of some veg art we like, just to get you inspired. We've got a veg pot packaging refresh coming up so if you get something in quick you could see your work in the shops quite soon.

And in other creative photo news our Emma Hines won the weekly Times travel photo competition last week for a very colourful picture she took while out trekking in Vietnam. Well done Em.

say bonjour to our french telly ad

It's been a busy week with telly adverts for us this week. Dan's been down the park in the rain making a new ad (sneak preview below).

And our friends over at La Halle aux Fruits (Fruit Towers in France) have a had shiny new advert on the telly earlier this year. It's not on French telly anymore but you can watch it below if you weren't on holiday in France, with a TV on in the background of your hotel room, at the time.

There's a special prize for the first person to interpret the full ad into English correctly. Just leave your interpretation as a comment to this blog post. Then we'll get our Matt in France to judge the closest interpretation, as his French is better than ours. I bet you're wishing you paid attention to French lessons in school now aren't you?

UPDATE: The competition is now over, Matt has done his judging and has decided that @agneau was the best interpretation. No arguing, Matt's French. Well done Agneau, we'll be in touch to sort out your prize. And a grande merci to everyone else who took part.

moonlighting

Do you remember our Eddie? Our Eddie who dressed up as Mickey Mouse that time?

He's just been pulled up for moonlighting (the practice of carrying out two paid full time jobs at once, not the mid 80's American television series starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as private detectives with romantic undertones). He's trying to keep a low profile at the minute and has been wearing shades all day, which isn't really helping his case a huge amount.

Uncanny.

the people's label

You might remember we ran a competition back in May where you could write your own label for one of our bottles.

There were over 300 entries and last week, the innocent family voted for their favourite.

It was a close call but in the end, Chloe from Enniskillen was the hands down winner.

Her words will be joining the brand new set of labels that we've been working on and that are literally heading off to the printers today.

Don't worry. The apostrophe in 'people's' is fully present in Chloe's winning label. It just got missed on this competition template. Wrists have been slapped and ears well clipped as a result.

Here's a little sneak preview of what's in store from our shiny new packaging collection (by way of a treat/apology for poor punctuation)

 

Big well done again to Chloe on her excellent label. Keep your eyes peeled for our new Autumn/Winter label collection, on shelf from September.

summer reads (makes me feel fine)

Don't fancy chancing it last minute at the airport bookshop or leafing through the array of dog eared, musty smelling paperbacks at the holiday cottage this summer?

Then let these good folk recommend some top reads to pass the time on whichever beach/poolside/country stile you happen to be reclining on this holiday season.

Charlie H recommends: The Road Home by Rose Tremain

'All about this guy from Eastern Europe who escapes tragedy to save money, chase dreams and hit the rawness of the streets of London. It's a real tear jerker. And if you don't cry, then basically, you've got no soul.'

Jo G recommends: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 

 

'Death tells the story all about a little girl growing up in Nazi Germany. It's a poignant tragedy that makes you think about death in a totally different way. An utterly gripping read.'

Dan recommends: What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami

'I loved this book about running. It made me think a bit about why I run, and why we do things in general. The result? I will run a little more.' 

Tansy recommends: You can be as young as you think by Tim Drake and Chris Middleton

'I don't usually delve too much into books that make me 'prod myself' - far too scary - but this is a nudging gem. All about taking a youthful outlook on life and making it much more fun in the process. My brain age is apparently nearing middle age (it starts going downhill from 23)  so I found it just in time. Hopefully by the end of the summer, I'll be all teenager like again.'

Gav recommends: Christine by Stephen King

'Possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury. Drives itself. Kills people. Doesn't like owner's girlfriend. Only one chapter to go. Hecking loving it.'

If after that final rave review you fancy reading more about maniacal motors, then just guess below which page Gav is currently on and if you're within 22 pages, we'll send you the book once he's finished reading it.