Valentine's Chocolate Bouquet

Valentine's Chocolate Bouquet

I made this chocolate monstrosity for Rich and it was supposed to be for Valentine's Day but due to the unexpected snow flurry he was working from home this afternoon and he's already seen it. Oops! Still, it means I can do this blog a bit earlier.

We don't usually bother with Valentine's Day and never get each other cards let alone gifts. There's only 4 weeks between mine and Rich's birthdays and Valentine's is right in the middle so it's not really something that we feel the need to celebrate. But I've wanted to make a chocolate bouquet for ages so Valentine's is the perfect excuse. 

To make this bouquet you'll need a few simple pieces of kit.

I used a cylindrical gift box that I got from The Card Shop, wooden garden cane from Wilkinsons and some oasis (usually used by florists) from Hobbycraft. I also used some flower themed cupcake wrappers from Cakes Cookies and Crafts. I had everything apart from the container already lying around the house and if you don't want to have to go to several shops there are other things you can use. Kebab skewers instead of garden cane, polystyrene instead of oasis and the cupcake wrappers are entirely optional. There are a lot more options for the container - vases, gift bags, bowls etc.  

You'll also need some goodies. I picked up some of Rich's favourite chocolates but I also got a marshmallow Me to You bear lolly because I thought it was a nice addition to the Valentine's theme. 

Additional items needed are sellotape and something to cut your rods - I used secateurs. You can also add some decorations, I used a piece of shredded tissue paper to cover up the oasis and these cute heart picks I got from the 99p Store. 

Here comes the science.

Step 1

Put the oasis inside your container. Cover up with shredded tissue paper if desired.

Step 2

Push your rod through a cupcake wrapper like this. If you're not using cupcake wrappers then just skip this step. Pull the wrapper down to the bottom of the rod ready for the next step. 

Step 3

Secure a chocolate bar to the rod using a couple of strips of sellotape on the back. You could use glue but it's a lot messier and if you use tape you can easily remove the chocolate when it's time to eat it. 

Step 4

Pull up the cupcake wrapper so it sits underneath the chocolate bar like petals. 

Step 5

Insert your rods into the oasis. You'll want the chocolates to be at different heights so you can cut your rods down to size. I found it easier to put the rods into the oasis first to judge how much I needed to cut off. Play around with the arrangements until you find something you like. 

Step 6

Keep adding the rest of your chocolate until you're happy with how everything looks. It doesn't matter if you don't use everything you've bought. I ended up with a spare Toffee Crisp and box of Malteasers. They're unlikely to survive the rest of the week. Yum. 

Step 7

Add some decorations. I used the felt and glitter hearts but you can use anything your imagination can think of. Fresh flowers, ribbons, feathers - whatever you like. 

Step 8

You could finish things at step 7 but I do like to go over the top whenever I can so I tied on some bags of chocolates onto the base. Voila - a completed bouquet. 

While you're making this you'll have to be careful that the whole thing doesn't topple over. Keep the rods as short as possible and every time you add a chocolate, put the next one on the opposite side to balance things out. Once it's completed it will be stable, it's just during the creative process you'll need to watch out. This project is incredibly easy and only took me an hour. Chocolate bouquets cost an absolute fortune in the shops, similar ones online with the same amount of sweets are over £30 and that's without postage. And, perhaps best of all, there's no way one person can eat that much chocolate on their own so they'll have to share - huzzah!

Diabetes? I Dia-beat-it.

On Monday I had what is known as a glucose tolerance test. You have a blood test and then you drink a small cup of glucose solution and two hours later you have another blood test. Today I saw the diabetes specialist for the results and got the news I'd been hoping for - I no longer have diabetes.

I'm writing this blog because I knew I'd get questions and they've already started. You can't cure diabetes, it's not something you can take antibiotics for and after a few weeks it goes away. It's usually a life long condition but can be managed with a variety of drugs and informed choices about food and drink.

By way of background I had type 2 diabetes and it was what is known as NODAT - Now Onset Diabetes After Transplant. It is incredibly common to get diabetes after any kind of organ transplant. The anti-rejection drugs and steroids artificially push blood sugar levels up as well as causing rapid weight gain. Personally, I put on 3 stone in 4 months.

I started to get symptoms at the beginning of March last year, around 8 months after my transplant. Routine transplant blood tests showed that my blood sugars were exceptionally high. I was referred to the diabetes nurse at my local GP surgery and was closely monitored for a fortnight because the healthy range of blood sugar should be between 5 and 7 whereas mine was between 26 and 33. Very scary indeed. With the help of medication I was able to bring it down to safe levels but it meant a daily cocktail of 2 tablets, Metformin and Gliclazide and 2 injections, Insulin and Victoza. It took a few weeks to mix the perfect cocktail, a few times I'd have cold sweats and shaky hands. In the space of 3 weeks my sugars had gone from 33 to 3.

Over the next few months with the help of the renal doctors my transplant medication was reduced. I was weaned off of steroids and finally came off them in July. That made a phenomenal difference and I was able to decrease my dosage of Insulin.

I lost the 3 stone I'd gained after the transplant, coming off the steroids really helped this, and as the dosage of the other transplant medications were reduced, I was able to gradually drop the diabetes medication. First I stopped taking the Gliclazide, then I stopped the Insulin, then the Victoza and finally the Metformin. I haven't taken any medication for diabetes since November and my blood sugar averages a healthy 5.6 reading even on Christmas Day after champagne and orange juice for breakfast, a huge roast dinner and mountains of chocolate.

It's not unusual for a transplant patient to be able to get rid of their diabetes as long as they do what the doctors tell them, which is exactly what I did. It's taken almost a year but I've followed all their instructions and the hard work has paid off. There is no guarantee that I won't get it again in the future but my doctor says that I keep on doing what I'm doing then I've got no reason to be worried. I'll have another glucose tolerance test in 6 months time just to see how everything is and I've got a diabetic eye test in a few weeks time just to check whether any damage has been caused but other than that I can forget all about it. No medication, no sugar level tests in the morning and after meals and no more worrying. Huzzah!

Five Years Since My Friend Took Her Own Life

Next week is the fifth anniversary of a friend taking her own life. We all know the cliche of time being a great healer but it isn't. The emotions today are as raw as they were back then.

I can remember in vivid detail what happened the moment I found out. The text message came in and it was so blunt and to the point. The final sentence was 'She's gone' and it will stay with me forever. I didn't believe it at first and called the sender, my best friend, to ask what she was talking about. It was late at night, around 11pm, and I was living on my own in London. Our conversation was brief as we were both in shock and five minutes after I hung up I was crying like I'd never cried before. I phoned someone who didn't know my friend and sobbed down the phone at them saying that I couldn't believe what had happened.

The next morning is a total blur. I woke up, showered, got dressed, caught the train and went to work. I sat at my desk but instead of starting work I logged into Facebook. I began looking at photos of her and getting more and more worked up to the point of hysteria. A colleague walked by and said good morning. Thankfully it was a colleague I was friendly with because within seconds of her words coming out I broke down and all the emotion came out. I can't remember her taking me out of the building but I found myself sat on a wall outside the office on an incredibly busy street in the middle of the city with a cigarette in my hand which was so weird because I made sure never to smoke at work. I'd stopped screaming by that point and was calm but the tears were still coming so I sat there silently crying. I didn't care that people were looking at me as though I was some kind of lunatic, my friend was dead and at that moment it was the only important thing in the world. I don't recall the conversation I had with my colleague but whatever she said must have helped because she snapped my brain back to reality. What the hell was I doing still in London and why the hell was I at work. I went to the head of the department and said I had to take some time off at short notice and then I left. Within an hour I'd gotten back to my flat, packed a bag and got in my car to head to my home town.

I went straight to the place where my group of friends were congregating. I remember people coming and going, I remember people crying and I remember the big joke about one of our group taking longer to get there from the other side of town than it had taken me to get there all the way from London. I was there for a few days but I can hardly recall a single solid thing, it's like those days are gone from my memory. I know we talked about her and shared stories but that's it. I think we were all just so stunned. I'd been talking to her only a couple of days before hand about arranging a stripper for our youngest friend as he was about to turn 18. She had plans, things to look forward to.

When I got back to London I sat on my bed and ate an entire tub of Ben & Jerry's Baked Alaska. I cried the whole time. And then the world started turning once more. Normal life resumed except it could never be normal again. My beautiful friend is dead.

Every year since then I've followed the same ritual. Every day in the week leading up to the anniversary I look at photos of her, I watch her YouTube videos and I listen to the song she was playing when she died. I feel so sad for her that it becomes a physical pain. Sometimes I get angry, sometimes I smile and sometimes I cry but whatever the reaction, it hurts so very much. I miss her.

I've purposely not revealed her name or how she died - her story is not mine to tell. What I will say though is that her death is down to depression. She was such a beautiful person inside and out. I know that is what everyone says but in this case it's the truth. She had a figure that people pay a lot of money to replicate and she loved kids, animals and her friends. She was always up for a good time and always had a smile on her lovely face. But the thing with depression is you can't see it and underneath it all she was hurting.

Her pain is now ours to carry. We have lost somebody special and we also have to live with the fact that we couldn't help her. Deep down we know its not our fault but it still doesn't make it any easier.

The impact of suicide was not new to me. My maternal grandmother took her own life many years before I was born. Again, depression was to blame. The ripples and aftershock of suicide travel through the years and can never be forgotten. They find ways of encroaching into happy times and tainting things. When something good happens and then you remember you can't share it with that person. The memories you have of that person become bittersweet. The death of my friend and the circumstances around it are just so tragic and it scares me to know that other people may be feeling what she did.

So much has happened in the last five years from world wide events to small personal victories. But every February I'm back in my tiny flat in London reading a text message with the worst possible news. It will be the same in another five years time. These emotions are never going to go and in a twisted kind of way, I like it. It means I'll never forget her.