Christmas time also means winter; sometimes, you really want to snuggle up somewhere warm and drink as many hot drinks and fun food as possible. Or, to put it another way, there are plenty of lovely things to eat, drink, and be merry. If you’re anything like us, you already have a home filled with books, DVDs, and life-sized statues of Bruce Campbell, so the gift of food can be a good way to give something that doesn’t add to the permanent clutter of your home.
If you’ve been to a cinema in the last year or so, you may be familiar with Joe & Seph’s, the gourmet popcorn company beloved by film lovers everywhere. Joe & Seph’s have gone full Christmas this year with Candy Cane, Egg Nogg and Yule Log flavoured popcorn. Their thing is to put sticky, sweet popcorn into anything delicious you can imagine. Their popcorn chocolate slabs are blocks of lovely chocolate slathered onto sweet popcorn.
Joe & Seph’s have combined pretty much any comfort food you can think of with very nicely made popcorn. They even run a subscription service for the Popcorn fanatic in your life.
Chocolates are always a good idea for Christmas, New Year, or any other time really. LoveRaw are part of the new wave of chocolate creators who do something a little different. LoveRaw’s thing is that they are vegan. Their advent calendar is surprisingly tasty, the plant-based ingredients elevating it beyond the usual fare you get in a Christmas cardboard frame. Other traditional chocolate snacks have been given the Love Raw treatment. For example, their nutty choc balls are crunchy hazelnuts coated in delicious vegan hazelnut cre&m® and covered in a crisp wafer shell – perfect for an ambassador’s reception.
The Starter Mix contains a nice mix of their wafer bars, chocolate bars, and the like. It’s pretty much a perfect choice of brand for vegans and non-vegans alike. Over at STARBURST Towers, we crunched our way through a pile of this stuff, and honestly, if it’s every bit as delicious as regular good chocolate, it’s just nicely inclusive. Delicious stuff.
If gaming is more your thing, however, you may want to take a look at some lovely things for the folk at Honey Badger Games. They do all sorts of geek-themed teas and sweeties. Their Food Pawn range comprises a collection of shaped jelly sweets in tubes. These are shaped like dice, meeples, or potion bottles. They’re thick sweeties, closer to what you’d get in a restaurant than at a sweet shop, and look so fun it feels a shame to eat them.
Honey Badger also does a range of teas. These are also geek-themed, so we get Wizard’s Tea (good black tea), Barbarian’s Tea (a nice spicy Rooibos), and Paladin’s Tea (a very tasty white tea). They also make Kit Teas, a tea suitable for humans and cats. These contain catnip (which can be used as a tea), and you’re encouraged to cool down the drink and feed it to your familiar. They’re also fantasy-themed, so you can feed them to your pet Displacer Beast if you wish.
Anyway, those are our picks for odd Christmas snacks and food-related gifts for the holiday season. What are your favourite geeky foods? Let us know the usual way.
