Topical chocolate
In the run up to Easter, the shops are brimming with chocolate bunnies and eggs. What is it about a Christian event that compels one to eat chocolate?
Take Christmas! Traditionally a time not just for the sort of commercial excess that the government hopes will kick-start the economy but also a time of feasting. A time of year when you are not only accepted but expected to have alcohol with your breakfast, when folk who normally watch their weight can be seen adding double cream to just about every dish they cook, including gravy, and where nothing makes more sense after a huge roast dinner than to serve a heavy fruit pudding, with cream, on fire.
These days I have a glass of something fizzy and a bacon sandwich for breakfast but, when I was a child, my breakfast consisted of as much of the contents of my Cadbury selection box as I could manage before the sugar rush made my hands shake so much I couldn't unwrap any more chocolate.
The selection boxes of my youth seemed huge things, as long as your arm and stuffed with many different sorts of chocolate. If you had siblings, then complicated trades were established as favourites were exchanged. Ultimately of course this was futile, it was all Cadbury chocolate, and each different type of chocolate bar was essentially the same product in different coloured wrappers with either a sporting or space theme.
As important as the chocolate were the games on the back of the box. Expensive toys were left unattended, traditional board games that would, later over Christmas lead to bitter division (has a game of 'Risk' ever ended harmoniously?) were forgotten as one hunched attentively over the back of the box, studiously reading the rules for a turn based game, the object of which was usually to get to the centre of the board, thereby making your opponent cry.
Essential to making progress round the board was the colourful six sided cardboard spinner that was used instead of a dice. You cut the spinner out of the back of the box and pierced its centre with a match stick, making it spin. Luckily, back in the day everybody smoked and so matches were never in short supply. Oddly, you never thought 'let's just use the dice from the Monopoly set that's lying open over there', but always went to the trouble of making the spinny thing. These days you could devote a whole hour on QVC to flogging a bit of coloured card and a spent match as some enthused-to-the-point-of-medicated woman bangs on in a slightly shrieky voice about 'crafting'.
You could almost taste the disgust as the parents looked on and wondered how on earth the 99p selection box had become the star prezzie.
Today's selection boxes seem a bit dull by comparison. I think the way forward must be the retro selection box. I don't mean some sort of crap nostalgia trip requiring you to bid on line for antique chocolate that results in your kid exhibiting a baffled expression on Christmas Day when confronted with their Six Million Dollar Man selection box with the contents two decades past their use-by dates. I mean a home made selection box!
All you need is a load of chocolate bars, some cardboard, pens, imagination and a boundless disregard for modern manners and equality legislation.
First things first, the chocolate. You'll need to combat the problem of the shrinking snack. It's not just your imagination, nor the fact that your hands have got larger as you have grown older; chocolate bars are smaller than they used to be, both by dimensions and weight. So, you need to find a way to upgrade the chocolate from bite sized to a respectable portion. The best way is of course a saucepan and some new moulds, but if you're in a hurry glueing two bars back to back using melted chocolate will do the job just as well.
Wrappers should be scanned, enlarged and then printed onto grease proof paper prior to being used to wrap your chocolate bar. Be sure to remove any product information that is not in English and may offend. This is especially important for any product information about a chocolate bar in printed in Arabic. Chocolate may be many things, but the snack of choice of desert dwelling people is not one of them. Replace any nonsense about daily allowances of fat or sugar or amphetamine or whatever with a single letter of the alphabet inside a gold circle. Do not explain why you do this. Children will automatically scent a competition of some sort and start hoarding wrappers. This means you can also remove the 'keep Britain tidy' symbol, your wrappers will not be blowing about in gritty concrete shopping centres, they are going to be safely in a box under some child's bed.
Next up, the selection box. Pick a theme; Christmas is always popular but is it Christmas under the sea, or on the moon, or is it tied to a popular television character, like Brucie? Up to you but if you're stuck for inspiration, you can't go wrong with a picture of Santa in a rocket ship. Ticks all the (selection) boxes.
Right, now the game. It's got to be simple, it's got to turn based and it's got to allow for reversals of fortune and for the lead to change for reasons other than a simple throw of the dice, or rather spin of the twirly thing. Pick your theme; 'lunar space race', 'race car race', 'catch the gypsy' and so on and design your course, remembering to place the all important forfeit squares, such as 'your joke about being able to see some sort of alien ship approaching earth backfires as you spark mass panic across the globe, go back two squares', 'you are suspected of using an illegal diffuser, miss a turn' or the classic 'you arrive at the illegal travellers encampment in the dead of night, but have forgotten your petrol and matches, go back to start'.
Finally the spinner, numbers or symbols or both? Certainly it's numbers for simplicity but symbols add a certain something to the gameplay. I favour the seven sided spinner with a drink symbol meaning that if it comes up, it's time to knock off for a glass of fizz. Remember, you can have that appearing as many times as you like, seven being the ideal in this case.
Take Christmas! Traditionally a time not just for the sort of commercial excess that the government hopes will kick-start the economy but also a time of feasting. A time of year when you are not only accepted but expected to have alcohol with your breakfast, when folk who normally watch their weight can be seen adding double cream to just about every dish they cook, including gravy, and where nothing makes more sense after a huge roast dinner than to serve a heavy fruit pudding, with cream, on fire.
These days I have a glass of something fizzy and a bacon sandwich for breakfast but, when I was a child, my breakfast consisted of as much of the contents of my Cadbury selection box as I could manage before the sugar rush made my hands shake so much I couldn't unwrap any more chocolate.
The selection boxes of my youth seemed huge things, as long as your arm and stuffed with many different sorts of chocolate. If you had siblings, then complicated trades were established as favourites were exchanged. Ultimately of course this was futile, it was all Cadbury chocolate, and each different type of chocolate bar was essentially the same product in different coloured wrappers with either a sporting or space theme.
As important as the chocolate were the games on the back of the box. Expensive toys were left unattended, traditional board games that would, later over Christmas lead to bitter division (has a game of 'Risk' ever ended harmoniously?) were forgotten as one hunched attentively over the back of the box, studiously reading the rules for a turn based game, the object of which was usually to get to the centre of the board, thereby making your opponent cry.
Essential to making progress round the board was the colourful six sided cardboard spinner that was used instead of a dice. You cut the spinner out of the back of the box and pierced its centre with a match stick, making it spin. Luckily, back in the day everybody smoked and so matches were never in short supply. Oddly, you never thought 'let's just use the dice from the Monopoly set that's lying open over there', but always went to the trouble of making the spinny thing. These days you could devote a whole hour on QVC to flogging a bit of coloured card and a spent match as some enthused-to-the-point-of-medicated woman bangs on in a slightly shrieky voice about 'crafting'.
You could almost taste the disgust as the parents looked on and wondered how on earth the 99p selection box had become the star prezzie.
Today's selection boxes seem a bit dull by comparison. I think the way forward must be the retro selection box. I don't mean some sort of crap nostalgia trip requiring you to bid on line for antique chocolate that results in your kid exhibiting a baffled expression on Christmas Day when confronted with their Six Million Dollar Man selection box with the contents two decades past their use-by dates. I mean a home made selection box!
All you need is a load of chocolate bars, some cardboard, pens, imagination and a boundless disregard for modern manners and equality legislation.
First things first, the chocolate. You'll need to combat the problem of the shrinking snack. It's not just your imagination, nor the fact that your hands have got larger as you have grown older; chocolate bars are smaller than they used to be, both by dimensions and weight. So, you need to find a way to upgrade the chocolate from bite sized to a respectable portion. The best way is of course a saucepan and some new moulds, but if you're in a hurry glueing two bars back to back using melted chocolate will do the job just as well.
Wrappers should be scanned, enlarged and then printed onto grease proof paper prior to being used to wrap your chocolate bar. Be sure to remove any product information that is not in English and may offend. This is especially important for any product information about a chocolate bar in printed in Arabic. Chocolate may be many things, but the snack of choice of desert dwelling people is not one of them. Replace any nonsense about daily allowances of fat or sugar or amphetamine or whatever with a single letter of the alphabet inside a gold circle. Do not explain why you do this. Children will automatically scent a competition of some sort and start hoarding wrappers. This means you can also remove the 'keep Britain tidy' symbol, your wrappers will not be blowing about in gritty concrete shopping centres, they are going to be safely in a box under some child's bed.
Next up, the selection box. Pick a theme; Christmas is always popular but is it Christmas under the sea, or on the moon, or is it tied to a popular television character, like Brucie? Up to you but if you're stuck for inspiration, you can't go wrong with a picture of Santa in a rocket ship. Ticks all the (selection) boxes.
Right, now the game. It's got to be simple, it's got to turn based and it's got to allow for reversals of fortune and for the lead to change for reasons other than a simple throw of the dice, or rather spin of the twirly thing. Pick your theme; 'lunar space race', 'race car race', 'catch the gypsy' and so on and design your course, remembering to place the all important forfeit squares, such as 'your joke about being able to see some sort of alien ship approaching earth backfires as you spark mass panic across the globe, go back two squares', 'you are suspected of using an illegal diffuser, miss a turn' or the classic 'you arrive at the illegal travellers encampment in the dead of night, but have forgotten your petrol and matches, go back to start'.
Finally the spinner, numbers or symbols or both? Certainly it's numbers for simplicity but symbols add a certain something to the gameplay. I favour the seven sided spinner with a drink symbol meaning that if it comes up, it's time to knock off for a glass of fizz. Remember, you can have that appearing as many times as you like, seven being the ideal in this case.
