How many beans make five?

If you've got to work in the evening...

This sure as hell beats doing it still in the office!

Not pictured:  cat rubbing round my feet.

In honour of Hotel Chocolat being one of the runners-up in the St Albans retailer of the year award, I thought I’d post a picture of the ‘Excellence 2008’ box from their Chocolate Tasting Club.

Click through the picture for descriptions

For those of you who’ve not heard of the club, they send you, er, a box of chocolates to, er, taste.  Hence the name.

I’ve stopped getting the boxes every month and now have them on a quarterly basis, but we do get the annual ‘best of’ box.  And this one was a stonker.  Not a single chocolate rated less than 9/10 (and there’s normally one or two that I’d score at around 6/10), an average of 9.4 and no fewer than five chocolates I rated at 10/10.  Step forwards:

Red, White & Blue Best supporting fruit – white chocolate ganache mixed with redcurrants and blueberries, enrobed in a white chocolate shell.

Caramel Melt Most mellow – A firm praline brimming with earthy hazelnut, blended with an all natural essence of traditionally British caramel toffee enrobed in a silky smooth milk chocolate topped with a 100% cocoa swirl.

Dutch coffee Members’ choice – looks like a little chocolate coffee cup.   Filled with ganache mixed with coffee and advocaat, topped with white chocolate lid and sprinkles of coffee.

Eton mess Best members’ creation – wish I’d thought of this one for the competition.   Meringue with strawberry buttercream enrobed in white chocolate, topped with freeze dried strawberry pieces.  Surely as close as you can get to real Eton mess in a chocolate?

Amaretti Creme Best dressed – amaretto creme in a dark chocolate topped with an amaretti biscuit.   Shame one of mine was crushed in the post (very top right) but it tasted just as good!

Made you feel hungry yet?

Finally downloaded the pictures to follow up on last week’s video.  And the darn rain meant they really weren’t very good.  Here’s about the only one worth seeing:

An occasional column…

Every so often I treat myself to a good old English fry-up.  St Albans isn’t short of places for this – so I thought I should try a few new places.

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Abigail''s tearooms in Village Arcade does serve breakfast, but you might want to save it for a day you're having a lie-in as they're not actually open at breakfast time!  The decor is typical English tearoom style (lacy tablecloths and the like) but the view if you can sit outside is very good - it's about 100 yards from the Abbey and even closer to the Vintry gardens if you fancy a stroll to work off your food!

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Breakfast is £4.50 for bacon, egg, sausage, beans, tomato and toast.  Pictured is the large (£6.50) with two of everything. Coffee and tea are extra, but still very reasonable.   The staff are friendly, service was good (it only took five minutes, even though 'you'll have to wait a few minutes as chef is just parking his car').

Pros:  Location, location, location (channeling Kirsty & Phil here), choice of brown toast.

Cons:  No mushrooms (one of my favourites).

Would I return?  Yes.   Though perhaps not for breakfast - they also do a very good Welsh rarebit which I've had before, and Sarah is rather fond of their cheesy crumpets.

(With apologies to J R R Tolkein).  What one word is scarier than any of the other in the English language?

For those of you with views on the merits and demerits of health and safety, this video is very worth watching (found via Bishop Alan's blog)...

Someone asked me this after I posted my first videos the other day – why was I trying to get my Flip camera to work with Vimeo, when YouTube works right out of the box?  And surely everyone uses YouTube, right?

Well, there is some truth in all of that.   But then Vimeo does what YouTube does just a whole lot better.   No doubt those of you of experts will correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t their website just *so* much nicer looking?  And easier to use?

On top of that, they also have some seriously good content which is viewable in HD.   Try this for size:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Click on the full screen icon (the four arrow thing just to the left of the Vimeo logo) and you’ll see what I mean.   Now, if only I liked chewing gum – this guy got paid by Stride to go round the world doing this dance and videoing it.  Nice work if you can get it…

First it was Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2 on the PlayStation 2.   Then Guitar Hero III on a whole range of platforms – including the Wii for the first time.   Now, hot on the heels of that offering are three more that Activision is trying to tempt your to splash out your Ninty fanboy cash on.  And I’m just not quite convinced about the hardware costs.

• Guitar Hero Aerosmith – well, that’s OK; the guitar is identical other than an Aerosmith face plate.  Yes, OK, if you want to rock out to Steve Tyler and Joe Perry’s finest, you can – but if you want that second guitar it’ll be an extra £35 – which is a lot for just another faceplate.
• Guitar Hero World Tour – we don’t know how good this’ll be on the Wii yet.  But, as this’ll have a drum kit, microphone and guitar in the hardware package, it’ll be pricey.  OK, so they’ve said it’ll work with the GH III guitar and any old USB microphone, but the drum kit will still tempt a lot of folk – although how many people’s families / significant others will put up with a replica drum kit in the living room remains to be seen.
• Guitar Hero On Tour – the franchise comes to the Nintendo DS.   Well, I’m not sure I’d be quite like these folk:
  all of whom appear to have far too few manners to not be using headphones to play the game. 
  Heck, I’d even feel guilty for sitting on a train using this with headphones – the constant clack-clacking of the buttons on the fret attachment would no doubt annoy my fellow passengers.

All in all then, I think I’ll give these a miss.   Well, apart from the disc-only version of the Aerosmith game maybe.   But I do resent having to buy lots of extra hardware – games don’t all need that.   And then again, it could be because my Lego Indiana Jones game does seem to be welded into the Wii, rather like I’m sure the Mario Kart DS cartridge is stuck in my DS!

A rainy day.  Men, women and children dressing up as large puppets.  What more excuse do I need to go try my Flip video out a little more?   Needless to say - I should probably have written a properly timed script to record this ;-)