OK, so who wants to win chocolate?

I thought that would grab your attention. One of the self-imposed rules I have for this blog is never turn down  offers of chocolate. Not usually for me, although I quite like chocolate, but husband loves his chocolate and obviously, Monkey and Missy Woo do too.

Luckily, a very nice lady regularly offers me the chance to try Hotel Chocolat products and we love their products. Obviously, with Christmas around the corner, this time we are looking at gifts for the festive season.

And boy, this one would make a special gift!

This is a chocolate wreath, known as the Purist wreath. A whole chocolate wreath, studded with almonds, hazelnuts, and jumbo golden raisins. The chocolate itself is 70% dark chocolate - my favourite sort - which is made from cocoa from a single estate in Ecuador. And it's solid; boy is it solid! Total weight is 450g and you need a knife (or a clean hammer!) to cut or chop it. This made it very chunky and crunchy to eat.

The chocolate is as rich as you would expect dark chocolate to be. Being quite chunky, we found it quite satisfying and rich to eat so we didn't gorge on chocolate. A box of chocolates would have lasted much less - we actually made it last several days without even trying. The children didn't really like the almonds but I loved all the nuts.

This would be a special gift for a lover of real good quality chocolate. It's quite expensive at £25 but if you can't afford that, there's a smaller one available for £9.

However, I'm giving you a chance to win one of your very own wreaths, worth £25 if you enter my little competition. It's been so long since I last ran a competition on here, I've almost forgotten what to do! To enter, just follow the instructions in the Rafflecopter widget below. The competition closes at midnight on Thursday 29th November, so get entering.

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

All aboard the Santa Express

The children with a friend 

You may remember a few weeks ago, I took the children to the National Railway Museum in York and I blogged about our VIP day. I didn't expect to be back so soon but we were invited to visit again and this time, try out Santa's Steam Adventure on the launch day last Saturday. This time, there were four of us as husband had taken a day off.

We arrived to collect our tickets and stopped for a coffee with Jen and Cass, who were also there with their children for the occasion. The children were super-giddy at the prospect of seeing Santa - although they know this one is not "the real Santa" - mainly because Missy Woo knew when she was 3 that her daddy was the Santa at the school Christmas fair, so we have to come up with a plausible explanation for this! They were keen to get a look at Santa's workshop and we'd been advised to allow some time for this. In reality, unless it's really busy, you don't need too long if your children are as giddy as mine were. They leg it down through and although they stopped to look at things, we were left kicking our heels a bit and the children were champing at the bit to get on the train.