A Christmas Basket

Just to prove that this blog has not become an "all cats, all the time" blog, I shall tell you about the gift basket I won at work yesterday. 

Every year at Christmas, people send gifts to the executives in our office - bottles of wine and scotch, boxes of chocolate, gift baskets, poinsettas, etc.  They in turn donate them to the employee raffle - we can all buy tickets and then they draw to see who gets to take which gift home.  The money raised (which is doubled by our senior vice president, who matches the total raised by the sale of the raffle tickets) is donated to the United Way.  This year we raised close to $800.

I was lucky enough to win this gift basket, filled with 21 various tasty items, both savoury and sweet:

such as:
- chocolate truffles
- Belgian truffles (is there a difference? I'm guessing there is, but I'm not a truffle eater so I really couldn't tell you!  aren't truffles those things that pigs root out with their snouts in France? I thought they were sort of like mushrooms? how do they get to be chocolate??)
- honey mustard flavoured pretzels
- garlic and herb cheese, with a little round dish and spreader to go with it;
- caramel wafer cookies
- chocolate taffy (not to be confused with the next item)
- chocolate toffee
- buttercrunch toffee with cashews
- almond hazelnut biscotti (definitely not for my mom, who is allergic to hazelnuts)
- flavoured hot chocolate mix
- butter flavoured pretzels
- chocolate pretzels
- chocolate hazelnut cream filled rolled wafers
- chocolate peppermint cookie brittle (this is the one I am most looking forward to try)
- Lindt Lindor chocolates (with not just any centres, but "delectably smooth centres")
- sesame water crackers
- squares of Ghirardelli dark chocolate

A veritable smorgasboard.  I donated several of the items to the Daily Bread food bank via my local grocery store. I figure the people using the food bank will be pretty well supplied with peanut butter, pasta and cans of tuna, they could also use some treats.  A few I kept myself and will be taking them home to share with my loved ones over Christmas.  Except maybe that cookie brittle, I might have to keep that all to myself!  Mmmm.