Alternative uses for tins no.4

While the tinned 'cocktails' I've tried so far (Bloody Mary beans, and the Pina Colada pineapple chunks of my previous post) have been somewhat lacking in their alcoholic content, that's not to say that you can't have a proper drink in a tin, should you wish to. There seems to be an growing trend in bars for using actual empty tins instead of glasses for their cocktails - here are two such examples I have tried recently:

"If you like Piña Coladas, and getting caught in the rain..."

...then you might have been disappointed by the sunny weather last Friday (10th July), but excited to have known that it was in fact National Piña Colada Day. I'm sorry not to have mentioned this important occasion in the drinks calendar in advance. While it might sound like this has been concocted purely as a marketing ploy, the piña colada is genuinely the 'national drink' of Puerto Rico, and is celebrated as such there annually on the 10th.

Elsewhere in the world though the celebrations are somewhat more commercial; had I told you about it in time, you too could have had a free Piña Colada last week - courtesy of Malibu, if you'd signed up on their pinacoladaday.co.uk website for a downloadable voucher, and joined their email mailing list. My apologies, I'm sure you're devastated to have missed out on enjoying and honouring this most sophisticated of cocktails, served up in a Malibu-branded faux-coconut cup.

But don't worry - you don't have to wait until next July to celebrate this most noble of drinks, or give away all your personal details to do so either. How so? Well, not all that long after buying the tin of bloody mary beans that featured in a previous post, I spotted this interesting-sounding tin of "Pina Colada" pineapple on the shelves of the canned fruit aisle. Was this part of a growing trend of tinned goods inspired by cocktails with an incredibly small amount of alcohol in them?

Kate & Wills & George &...

The weeks seem to be absolutely flying by at the moment - I couldn't quite believe there had been a gap of over a month between the last two posts I wrote, which really is terrible. And it's more than two months since I posted about the birth of the royal baby, whose name was later announced as Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, and was christened as such this Sunday just gone. What better excuse therefore to have a go at making that classic dessert, the charlotte.

While there are some quite fancy and fiddly versions of the dessert, such as the charlotte russe (with a Bavarian cream centre encased in sponge fingers), and the charlotte royale (which uses swiss roll instead and as you can see above, ends up looking weirdly brain-like), in its simplest form, a charlotte is made by lining a pudding basin or mould of some kind with bread, adding a filling of fruit and baking it in the oven. A Google search for recipes suggests that apple is the most common filling, but pretty much anything goes really, though I feel that berries, cherries and the like would take this a little too close to Summer Pudding, which is chilled rather than baked. I saw a couple of recipes for a pear charlotte, which as I happened to have a small tin of pear halves in my stash, seemed the perfect option.