"gift" news and stories

To go with your heart-shaped fried egg breakfast in bed on Valentine's Day, you will need some heart shaped accessories and tableware. Admittedly, "need" is a little strong of a word in this case, but Valentine's Day is one of those holidays where going over the top can be a good thing.

For tea drinkers, the Heart-Tea Strainer Set is a lovely way to prepare your tea. The strainer is in an arrow-in-heart design and is hand-cast out of pewter. It sits in a heart-shaped rest.

Coffee fans might get a little more use out of the coordinating Heart Coffee Scoop, which is shaped like one of cupid's arrows and is also hand-made from pewter. It holds about two tablespoons of coffee beans.

Once your coffee or tea is brewed and ready to serve, you'll want something to serve it in. Hallmark has a perfectly romantic heart-shaped mug (pictured) with a twist - the center well is heart-shaped, not the outside of the cup! They're only sold individually, so you might want to check out the similar six-piece set at Target, which includes matching heart-shaped mugs.

Perfect for a night in with a friend or a significant other, The Tasty Show's Chocolate Tasting for Two kit is a cute way to eat some chocolate, expand your palate and talk about food. The kit includes 15 different kinds of gourmet chocolate, a tasting guide and a couple of ratings cards so you can compare your reactions to the chocolate. The chocolates in the kit are small, but a good size for tasting so that you don't overdose on chocolate (yes, it is possible) and get bored before you get through all the samples.

An alternative to the kit is to simply buy several different types of chocolates from gourmet and specialty stores, but at just under $30, the kit really gives you a wide range of milk and dark chocolates - a wider range that $30 could buy you at many pricey gourmet stores - and you have the added benefit of getting some insight into chocolate tasting from the included guides. After you have something to work from, then you can head out to that specialty store and choose (and appreciate) your favorites, new or old.

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Chocolatier Pierre Marcolini's seasonal collection includes a very creative 5-pointed holiday star, where each point features a different flavor of ganache filling. Even better, each of the points is split into a milk and dark chocolate section, so in that one item, you get ten different chocolate experiences.

More intriguing, however, is Marcolini's chocolate molecule. Set on a tablet of dark chocolate, the chocolate molecule is represented with chocolate "ions" in a total of four flavors. The White Ion is white chocolate filled with a Moroccan spice-infused milk chocolate center. The Gold Ion features a caramel, roasted pineapple and praline center coated in dark chocolate and accented with gold. The Brown Ion is dark chocolate with a dark chocolate and caramel canter. The Bronze Ion has a gingerbread-spiced ganache coated in milk chocolate. At $80 for each molecule, this is not an inexpensive indulgence, but it is significantly larger than a real molecule and clearly an ideal gift for someone interested in the sciences.

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Recipe books aren't quite as popular as they used to be. More often than not, people buy cookbooks as gifts and pass those out to friends and family, not only because it's convenient (and the recipes are good), but because they don't necessarily have a collection of their own favorite recipes to pass on. Fortunately, as home cooking continues steadily growing in popularity, people are writing down what they like to cook. Often, these recipes show up on food blogs, but as gift idea, why not revive the idea of actually writing down those recipes to pass them on?

The Recipe Binder Set from russell+hazel includes two binders, each with recipe pages, recipe cards, menu planning sheets and measuring equivalent charts for easy referencing. There is room for photos and many computers will let you format recipes so they can be printed out directly onto the recipe cards. Alternatively, you might also have luck finding a blank recipe book at a stationary/card store, such as Hallmark.

When you finally get tired of the "good cholesterol, bad cholesterol" and the "good fat, bad fat" debates, you can make simply stop worrying and make things much clearer, at least where butter is concerned. "Christ Butter" and "Satan Butter" make it pretty clear which is "good" and which is not.

Actually, I'm just kidding. Much like the Cereal Bowl Light, these are not actually edible. The butter-stick-lookalikes are hand-carved in Charm City, Maryland from hardwood and then painted to look buttery before receiving the appropriate wrapping. The Christ butter is $9.99 a stick, while the Satan butter is only $6.66. The number (if you've ever seen The Omen) has significance, but when faced with two similar products, the lower priced one is certainly tempting.

Looking for a more secular spread? There is a "love butter" from this same line, or you could always stick with the real thing.

[via tsogb]

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