by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Social Media Day: Chameleon Net and #nfptweetup

Yesterday was clearly social media day. Well, given my job, every day is social media day but I don’t usually have a half day seminar about all things digital in the morning followed by an nfptweetup after work. Let’s take ’em one at a time.

Chameleon Net

I went along to the seminar in place of the Digital Marketing Manager. To be honest, we were both quite suspicious that it would be an extended sales pitch, but we needn’t have worried. The salesy part was thoughtfully kept to a 5 minute add-on at the end.  There were four conveniently succint presentations but the seating was more round table which made the Q&A at the end a little less pressured; everyone prefers an intimate roundtable to being the kid putting their hands up to ask another question, right?

The sessions were on:

The Online Power Cycle – A lovely 80s themed summary of the power of iterative and cyclical testing in marketing campaigns, courtesy of Richard Kirk.

Trolls, Lurkers & Evangelists – An introduction to online communities and identifying and building those communities in view of the fact that 90% don’t contribute. A useful case study of the new USA Today Kindness community and why the speaker, Drew Davies, suspected it would not succeed (I agreed).

S0cial Fundraising – A Case Study – A look at Diabetes UK’s challenges site with useful statistics from the first six weeks (70 challenges, £50,000 pledged, £1,500 banked), from Dan Martin. Diabetes UK is of course a client of CN.

HTML 5 – Barney Stephens took us through the long term implications on HTML 5 and where we can start to plan ahead and gently implement rolling changes to be in line with the new technology when it happens (in 2022…).

If the first session sounds interesting to you, then I recommend a 3-day trip to the IDM to do the introduction to Digital Marketing course I wrote about before, because it will cover this subject in far more depth. But if you’re really brand new and nervous, then a session like this with CN will push you in the right direction.

I could also have ditched the communities session because it was at a slightly basic level given our experiences using and building social networks – they pitched to the centre, quite rightly so – but found Drew an approachable type who quite clearly feels very passionate about this area; he’s someone I would talk to about the subject in the future.

The post-coffee break bit was where it was at for me. I enjoyed hearing a case study I was unfamiliar with, with a bright, simple idea implemented well. But the real jewel in the crown was the final session on HTML 5. It’s the first time a digital marketing / social media based session has gone even a little bit techy. And it’s important. Because even if you never build a website in your entire life nothing saves you money, time and grief more than knowing what the designers / developers are talking about and being able to give them a well-considered, thoughtful and knowledgeable brief.

While it might seem like HTML 5 implementation is light years away, we all know it’s harder to suddenly bring something up to date than to start planning for it in advance. Okay, I won’t be raring to use Canvas yet, but the potential to have lightweight graphics, dynamically updated on web pages (the text to which can be edited by any user just in their browser) is exciting. I’ll probably blather on about this in a bit more detail in a future post, as I want to get on to tweetup thoughts while they’re still fresh, but it was great to be able to get to grips with the geek in me.

Two people from Chameleon Net I’ve followed before now are Jon Dytor and Ross Miles. They have two of the most different tweeting styles you can imagine. They both came to the nfptweetup. More below…

NFPTweetup 1st Birthday

This was the first tweetup at which I’d tried to lend a helping hand with the organisation; both Jacqui and I felt we’d taken lots from previous events and it was time to give back.

The agenda was to have a short presentation critiquing a Twitter feed. I was to do a corporate one (or two, actually) and Steve Bridger picked a charity feed he was relatively unfamiliar with – Diabetes UK again! – to give his thoughts. Then there were break-out discussion groups around the subjects that come up time and time again: Fundraising, Communications, Campaigns, How To… and Integration (with other media online and off).

We ended up going with our strengths; I did a short presentation on what @paulhenderson rightly described as “one of the great loves of my life”, Disney, and Jacqui facilitated the group about Comms strategy since she has the perfect mix of traditional and digital experience. Our not-so-newbie-now Lo and I then ran around helping the fantastic Beautiful World team (who organise the event along with generous sponsors JustGiving) in tweeting updates from the different discussion groups.

I’m not going to recap on all the learnings because you can do that by reading through the @nfptweetup twitter feed and searching the hashtag #nfptweetup – although I will pick out one or two points in a moment. Firstly what I will say is what I enjoyed particularly about this event.

1. The Format

I think we’ve finally cracked the nut and found something that works (although as with cyclical testing, maybe it’s good to keep tweaking, eh?). Just enough presentation time that people can warm up and get their heads around things but not so much that they’re asleep – it is in the evening after all.

2. The Venue

Okay, we were ridiculously lucky to be invited to the East Winter Garden for part of Chain Reaction, but the different kinds of seating, small room, and general informality really helped to get the discussions feeling less like tutorials and more like the information-swapping, networking and learning events they should be.

3. The Subjects

They were chosen based on Beautiful World’s feedback after every event, and they were spot on. These are the things people wanted to talk about. Almost every group also had a discussion on tone, which made the critique at the beginning quite relevant.

Now, thoughts…

One thing that came out of the integration discussion was scheduling tweets. Now, there’s a time and a place for this. If you’re pitching to an audience when it’s in a different time zone. If you want to make sure something will go out at a certain time without forgetting or because you’ll be away / in a meeting. Use judiciously, I can see it being useful. Until last night I’d never heard of anyone exclusively tweeting that way. Ross Miles surprised me. He once to help Chameleon Net be seen as thought leaders, and therefore goes painstakingly through his RSS every morning, scheduling carefully spaced out tweets linking to posts on a variety of relevant topics. At 1:30pm, every day, he drops in one related tweet about CN – no more, as he doesn’t want to spam. He is a big NFL fan and has a whole other feed just for that. There is also a general @Chameleon_Net stream.

Now, I understand why he does it – lack of time, resource, etc. But I now feel a little bit like I wasn’t following Ross! I’m a great believer in tweets with personality. In fairness to Ross and his ability to write an interesting tweet, I obviously hadn’t noticed he was doing this, so he has taken the time to inject some personality. And, again in fairness to him, he does reply to tweets and respond unplanned whenever he can. But now I know, I think it does explain why I spend far less time tweeting Ross than his colleague Jon, who is very much himself, ad hoc and at random. Should Ross be saving the scheduled tweets for the main CN stream and give a little more insight into himself (NFL an’ all) as he fits in to the bigger CN picture? I think I would prefer that. I talked about this with him at the event, by the way, in case you think this is a bit of a passive-aggressive way of communication. During the course of the evening, Steve B. responded that he thought scheduling was not a path a charity should go down. I agree.

Onto something else.

I was actually quite hard on Disney considering how much I love it. But I think it’s quite silly that a company that has such evangelical adoration attached to it has a relatively personality-free and distant @disneyparks feed, but also employs wonderfully personable, interesting and sweet people like head of the Disney Moms Panel, @lauraspencerone. It baffles me that a company full of such – pardon the pun – characters would want to have a stream that feels quite cold. And that still hasn’t answered a question I asked several days ago. I know there is a streamed video of last night’s event which I will link to when I know where, so you can tell me if you think I was harsh.

Once again, the nfptweetup has come into its own as a useful place to challenge assumptions, get tips and learn something about the wider world of the big T. Come along next time; we can always keep learning.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Autumnal / Thanksgiving Baking: Pumpkin pecan muffins and mini pumpkin pies

Of course, I couldn’t just stop experimenting with muffin fillings after the apple crumble muffins. And once I’d spent a hysterical amount on a 425g can of Libby’s pumpkin, imported from the USA, I wanted to get my absolute money’s worth out of the rich orange paste.

Why not use fresh pumpkin? Because I haven’t before, and frankly it looked too much like hard work. Here’s what I made.

Pumpkin and Pecan Muffins

Pumpkin and pecan muffinsThe old Rachel Allen 30 day muffin recipe came out again. I made a fresh full batch and used 500ml to make 22 mini muffins (again baked at around 170-180 for fifteen minutes until risen and spongy. Added to the 500ml was:

200g pumpkin pure
1 heaped teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
75g chopped pecans (walnuts work just as well)

I reserved some entire half pecans to put on the top. Now, this comes out very savoury. I prefer it this way, and would probably make maple buttercream icing (see below), then pop a half pecan on top. I didn’t have any maple syrup, and was short of time, so I just served them as is.

Alternatively, you could add 50ml or so of maple syrup / 50g of brown sugar direct to the pumpkin mix before stirring into the muffin batter; I haven’t tried it but expect that would work just as well. Or you could warm a little syrup and, when the muffins were still hot from the oven, prick the cakes on top with a toothpick and spoon warmed, runny syrup over the top, then serve as sticky cakes with vanilla ice cream.

Mini Pumpkin Pies

mini pumpkin piesThis meant making a batch of my shortcrust pastry, then following the recipe Libby’s give for pumpkin pie, making changes where I didn’t have the spices they suggest. I also had to make my own evaporated milk because I was out, which meant putting twice the amount of milk I needed in a saucepan and simmering gently – not boiling – until it reduced by half.

It worked out to:

225g pumpkin
1/4 pint evaporated milk
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Stir those all together into a relatively runny batter. Roll out the pastry to no more than 3-4mm at most, and stamp out circles, pressing them gently into tartlet molds. Pour a spoonful or so of filling into the hollow of the pastry, and bake at 180-190 (depending on oven) for 20 minutes, then check. At this point they might need another 5-10 minutes, or might be perfect, depending on the oven. They’ll be ready when the filling has set and just started to brown at the edges.

For the second batch of these, I made a buttercream icing (using golden syrup as I still hadn’t got round to buying maple, recipe below) and had some fun doing some cack-handed amateur icing. I also made a batch of slightly bigger mini-pies using an average-sized cupcake tin. They took around 35-40 minutes to cook.

Simple Buttercream

mini pumpkin pies with buttercreamIt’s best to make this with butter but if needs (or diet) must, margarine will do. It’s a little oilier, but it works. The icing pictured is made with it, as I was out of proper butter. It also needs to be last minute – although it will keep perfectly well overnight in the fridge it is a dairy ingredient and ought to be treated with respect from a food hygiene point of view. Oh, and don’t even try and cut corners and ice before the baking is completely cooled; you will just end up with a melted, messy, hard-to-handle blob (the thicker the paste, the easier it is to control the piping bag, and what I’ve pictured is slightly more melted and runny than I would usually like, due to tiredness and impatience!).

1 part butter – for 14 mini tarts I used 3 tbsp
Flavouring – in this case, 1/2 tsp vanilla and 1/2 golden syrup (maple syrup would have been more seasonal)
Icing sugar
Colour

Once the butter has been beaten with whatever liquid flavouring you’re using, start mixing in heaped tablespoons of sugar until a thick, pipe-able, pale, fluffy icing has formed. It will warm up from your hand in the piping bag, so a stiff icing is essential. You’ll need at least three times as much icing as butter. When it’s at the right texture, add whatever colour you want, or just leave it to its rich, buttery, natural yellow.

I piped most of them round the edges, but also did some comedy ones, spelling out Ash’s name or trying a swirl in the centre (a mistake – the piping nozzle I’d chosen was too small for a centre piece, and it looked a little like the icing monster had had an ‘accident’ on the pie).

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Recipe: Apple Crumble Muffins

muffinsI’m going to do a really annoying thing and refer you to another site for this one, because I’ve already written up and published the recipe on BitchBuzz.

The basic premise is plain muffins with an apple filling and crumbly topping. I give the recipe for the filling and links to the book I got the muffin recipe from and a Google search for plain muffin recipes. I also list some alternatives I’d like to try out.

As my colleague Lo would say: I’m not gonna lie to you. They were gorgeous.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Decoy kittens have found homes – thankfully never at risk of PTS

I received the following from my friend Sam, who contacted Decoy Kitten Rescue about the 60 kittens in need of homes that the Daily Fail Mail had said were due to be killed if homes were not found. He got the reply directly from a volunteer at the centre:

I am a volunteer at Decoy Kitten Rescue.

Anyone wishing to donate money can send a cheque made payable to: C.Hardwicke (Decoy Kitten Rescue) and send it to:

Decoy Kitten Rescue

40 Keyberry Park
Newton Abbot
Devon

TQ12 1DF


Please note that we never spoke to the daily mail or ANY of the tabloids.

NONE of our animals were going to be destroyed… we rescue NOT kill. [my emphasis]

All the cats that are ready for rehoming have been allocated and homes are ready and waiting for our little ones when they are ready too.

I appologise for people not being able to get through on the phone but we have been experiencing high call volumes.

We do have a Facebook page… just type Decoy Kitten Rescue in the search box to find us.

You can also message Claire Hardwicke directly on Facebook.

I hope this helps

thankyou

kind regards

Lisa

So, the upshot is, the kittens have homes (possibly, in fairness, thanks to the publicity afforded to them by the Mail, even if they did add a crucial detail the centre claims not to have told them) and they were not on death row.

Phew.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Facebook’s redesign makes it the overbearing parent of social networks

Seriously, Facebook; we need to talk.

The suggestions. The news feed vs live feed. The nonsensical Events blocking… it’s got to stop. There’s got to be a way out. I’m a regular user, logging in every day like clockwork. I am an admin for a page with over 57,000 members, on which I post at least five times a week.  But you’re treating me like I’m disinterested at best and a spammer at worst. Not so pleasant for someone who has both personal and professional reasons to use the site.

Let’s look at the last week.

The Suggestions

In the last week, you’ve suggested I reconnect with someone who passed away barely ten days ago, and my own husband. While I can understand that you can’t tell from an active profile if the person is actually still running it or not, the relationship status should be an easy one to read. I’m sure I’ve heard tell of possible memorial pages, too…?

My mother doesn’t even tell me which of my friends I should be getting in touch with again. It’s creepy, and completely unnecessary.

The Events

I’m very spam-aware. When I was creating the Christmas events for the Dogs Trust Facebook Page, I even stated to the members on the page that I would be as careful as I could not to spam them and could they please bear with me. I was happy to see it was not a required step to publish the events to the news feed; neither was it necessary to invite anyone. So I deliberately didn’t publish them and didn’t invite anyone. Ergo, no spamming.

You sent a big, rude, red message up on the screen saying I was spamming and risked having my account blocked. Please rework your algorhythms to take into account that you cannot spam people if they can’t see what you’re adding in their updates or invites.

Live Feed vs News Feed

Seriously, are you kidding me? My friends have to like something and I have to start ‘liking’ and commenting just to be considered to be engaging? I can’t read something anymore? Sometimes I don’t comment etc because I don’t want the updates coming to my phone’s Facebook app and the emails clogging up my inbox. I genuinely want those notifications when I am bothered enough to comment, and I understand you want more site stickiness and engagement, but assuming you know what I’m interested in is a step too far.

My friends like lots of stuff I don’t. I like lots of stuff they don’t. Don’t force me into fiddling with settings etc to get the people I want included. At best, the news feed ought to be an optional setting that you can arrange for yourself, including a select group – a bit like Lists on Twitter. Facebook just isn’t as clever as Google at working out what I’m interested in, and while the other options are there it still smacks of telling instead of offering.

I’m not going to lie; like most people change can annoy me just by its nature. But I’ve watched one thing after another change for the worse and it’s really getting irritating now. I can but hope that I will start to get used to Facebook’s overbearing parenting, but – fairly or not – I find myself increasingly comparing it to Twitter. Twitter doesn’t always get it right (I’m still baffled by the enforced blocking of replies to people you’re not following) but it does seem to be more led by by user choice. Facebook instead chucks auto-customisation at you and forces you to tweak it.

The problem is, many don’t bother. As a charity page admin, I now worry people who are genuinely interested but just not auto-clickers and commenters will be missing out on news. We are careful to post in a non-spammy way, but now that hardly makes any difference.

Ah, well.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

60 kittens in need of homes ASAP or risk being put to sleep

kittensIf you’re thinking of getting a cat, and can get to Devon, think harder, think faster, and do it by Wednesday.

Look, I’m so serious, I’m even linking to the blinkin’ Daily Mail.

The Decoy Kitten Rescue in Newton Abbot is closing down and the likes of the RSPCA (who use it as an overspill centre) are obviously too full to take them. I have no idea if anyone’s been on to Cats Protection, but I can’t imagine they’re any less full (they’re brilliant by the way).

Call 01626 205755 to ask about a kitten – or a cat, for that matter, as there are some adult ones too. I can’t bear to think of them dying while there are homes out there.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Signed up to NaNoWriMo… sort of

Schrodinger's LolcatFor the last two years, I’ve signed up to National Novel Writing Month and failed miserably.

In 2007 I did actually write 6-7,000 words of nonsense, largely as an exercise in having an idea as my writing muscles had near-irretrievably seized up. Last year I did nothing at all. The ideas were not flowing and I just didn’t have the time.

Having done nothing with the Monster Book since the epic 10,000+ word writing marathon at the Urban Writers Retreat, I’ve decided it’s time to go back to it. Now, NaNoWriMo prohibits use of pre-written prose as the idea is to freely write whatever and not be tied up in feelings about characters, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I’d rather have an idea I really want to work on and use it as an excuse to get a little further down that track than stare at the empty screen until I get thoroughly miserable and then ignore it until, oh, next May or something. So even if I nail the 50,000, I can’t win. That said, if I nail the 50,000 I’ll probably have finished the bugger and that’s a much bigger win than a snazzy web badge and PDF certificate will ever, ever be.

I plan to use the UWR to help me actually do this, too, if there are any sessions left this year. (There are). Plus this year I know more other people doing it and can use The Guilt to spur me on.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Social media surveys: have you ever read a helpful one?

You would think that the survey was the ultimate piece of social interaction. After all, you’re asking the person their opinion in an open way. But of course it’s not that simple. Research into surveys has thrown up all sorts of issues, such as people giving the answer they think people want to hear, or different answers from the same person to the same essential question asked three different ways.

That’s not to say surveys are completely unhelpful; they’re not, if they’re conducted intelligently and without the sense of having the results lined up and using the survey to fit the hypothesis (which isn’t really a hypothesis as you’ve already decided the result – following me?).

But surveys about social media are a dime a dozen these days, and few of them are remotely helpful to either social-savvy employees or potentially social-wary employers – or anyone in between, for that matter.

Take yesterday’s gem from The Telegraph about social networks costing the economy billions in lack of productivity, as reported in Social Media Today. The survey is rightly lampooned as it implies social networks are the only form of office timewasting – and before you ask, I’m writing this in my lunch break and rarely take the whole hour! – and relies on people estimating both their own usage and their colleagues’. I don’t know about you, but I take is as given that people are generally phenomenally bad at estimating anything. For example in that survey people estimated their own time spent on online networks at being about a third of the time their colleagues spent on them; the survey used the bottom number but really, aren’t they both shots in the dark?

I’ve been asked a number of times at conferences to say how long I use each network professionally for per week or per day. The answer is as long as is needed. Some days Twitter gets five minutes, if that, some days it gets two hours. Likewise Facebook, etc. If there are questions to be answered, comments to be responded to and news items to be shared, then that happens, in order of urgency, every day, no matter how long – or how little – it takes.  Of course that’s professional, not personal use, but even then I struggle to estimate the percentage of my time it takes as opposed to updating our websites, building microsites, running AdWords campaigns, writing presentations etc etc. So how utterly rubbish would I be at estimating my personal usage? Let alone Jacqui’s or Lo’s? Extremely, let me tell you. And I can only imagine those whose jobs have nowt to do with digital marketing are much the same.

The sole commenter on SMT points out a survey pointing in the other direction: Social media keeps [sic] employees’ heads in the game, screams the headline (‘media’ is plural. Hard to remember, even by me, but I at least try to check the title). This is duly commented on and gushed over… but is actually no more useful than The Telegraph’s alleged churnalism.

All it really says is that employers are using the established social tools, such as blogs, in place of the old emails and meetings. That gives people more of a right to reply, but doesn’t really tell you if as a result of doing that employees are any more productive or better informed. Perhaps there’s an argument for more engaged, but if you’re not asking the employees, how do you know for sure? It doesn’t sound like there’s any actual metric – of the kind we need to use to see how supporters are responding to professional networks – to base these results on other than, once again, poorly remembered anecdote. Take the meat of the results:

Nearly 80 percent (79%) of respondents said they use social media to frequently engage employees and foster productivity. Tools such as company blogs and discussion boards even outranked e-mail (75 percent) as means of keeping employees’ heads in the game.

Okay – they’re using it. Does it work?

I’m not trying to be difficult here, as it’s in my interest to support the latter kind of survey; the more people that are online during the day, the more people I can reach, professionally and personally.  And I recognise that one survey is not really an answer to the other, as one is focussing on estimated personal use and the other on professional use internal to organisations (although that means opening access and accepting that personal use will happen as a result).

I just can’t help feeling that, positive or negative towards social platforms, these surveys just muddy the waters and confuse already hesistant senior management teams further. Blanket statements and ‘proofs’ like these just lead to the situation I see coming up over and over again where teams are either told “we need a Facebook page” with no sense of the whys and wherefores (though isn’t that just whys and, erm, whys?) or told that it’s all a distraction, a fad and completely lacking in usefulness. What they really need is case studies and examples of the myriad ways companies in their sector are using social tools, and working out what’s good for them and where they can afford to experiment. There’s a massive wealth of this kind of resource for charities online, for example, but I’m still asked time and time again ‘how we convinced our managers’.

It wasn’t using linkbait, press-chasing surveys, that’s for damn sure.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

This week on BitchBuzz: simple recipes and women’s resources

And no, sexists among you, they’re not the same thing.

I’ve got a bit of a list of things to write about for BitchBuzz and haven’t had the time to do much of it.  I have made a start on a new post I hope to make quite a regular one, which is Simple Recipes for Anyone; basically, if you can’t make these then you should probably step away from the kitchen, never to return.

First up is shortcrust pastry, and in the schedule (but not live yet) is chocolate ganache icing. If you read this blog, you’ll actually already have seen the recipes for both of them… Given that the vast majority of people who come looking for this site are actually seeking buttercream icing, that’ll be next.

The women’s resources, on the other hand, are quite different and much more serious. The post is all about the Women’s Resource Centre and the wonderful things it does to support women’s organisations and lobby the Government.

Oh, and top of those I got in a quick piece about the Islington Contemporary Art & Design Fair, which fellow design fans ought to enjoy as it happens over the next few weekends.

Next on the list:

  • Quick travel guide to Rome
  • A piece about a very talented UK baker who’s now launching her own business
  • A savoury recipe (I know!)
  • A post on a cute cupcake bakery (no, there can never be enough)

Just as soon as I have time to write them.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Christmas ‘Baking’: Chocolate Rum Raisin Snowcups

rum raisin snowscapeYes, I used the C-word. Christmas.

It is a little early, but I really want to take some of the stress off my mother this year and, yes, show off a little. I went round to my mother-in-law’s last Friday for Shabbat (late to the party and baffled? I’m not Jewish, but my husband is) and she had made these plain chocolate cups by lining cupcake papers with melted chocolate. She then filled them with fresh whipped cream and strawberry slices and topped the whole mess of wonderful off with crumbled Flake. Gorgeous. And of course it got me thinking of what I could do. This is my first experiment.

As DiDi warned me, if you don’t coat the edges nice and thick, the cups fall apart when you peel away the paper. I was being a bit hasty so some of mine did fall apart. I was using petit fours cases and found that actually you could get away with a certain amount of crumbled edging if it’s small, cute and going to be filled to the brim. But perfectionists should be prepared to spend lots of time applying layers of melted chocolate onto paper cases with whatever implement suits you best (I used a grapefruit knife, my mother-in-law a plastic spoon).

Anyway, once they’ve fully set in the fridge, peel away the paper and get inventive with the filling. I put a handful of raisins in a saucepan with a healthy splash on rum on top, then simmered the contents of the pan for a couple of minutes. Then the heat went off, the lid went on and I gave them half an hour or so to soak up the drink. They then sat out (covered) long enough to cool down.

A heap of raisins went in the chocolate case and a little white chocolate was grated on top to make an artful, Christmassy snowstorm (at least that was the aim; if you think it looks more like Santa’s dandruff, you can leave it out).

Some other ideas I’ve thought of to experiment with:

  • Plain chocolate cups, blackberries smooshed into a lumpy, fruity syrup over heat with sugar and water, white chocolate curls
  • Any chocolate, mincemeat (as in what goes in mince pie, not lasagne!), crumbled cookie / oat topping
  • White chocolate cups, red berries in a little fruity syrup, decorated with holly leaves
  • White chocolate cups, crumbled up left-over Christmas pudding, a blob of cream
  • Layered cups – changing the colour of chocolate every time (after they’ve set in the fridge). Perhaps with a little hollow left for something crunchy – honeycomb?

I’m still thinking this through; I haven’t even got to the creamy or custardy fillings. The possibilities are endless provided you’re willing to spend hours footling chocolate around in paper cups. Of course you could do it without unpeeling them, leaving them in pretty paper cases but still getting the glorious choccy flavour, if you’re in a hurry.