Stuffed Melon

 Stuffed Melon

You will need:
Melon, strawberries and jelly crystals



This is a great dessert to make for on those 'lovely' hot nights such as we are having at the moment.  You can do it with whatever flavour jelly you like but I prefer 'port wine' or such.  Heck you can even put a little bit of grog (booze, alcohol ) in the jelly but not too much, mind you.  The jelly doesn't seem to set as well if you over dose.  Better off saying 'one for the jelly, two for me' then.


1. You are going to start by cutting the top off your melon. It could be a cantelope or a honeydew.  Just as long as it is a melon where all the seeds are in the middle and can be removed, all is good. Who knows how many different melons there are in the world.  You might also need to cut a little off the bottom to keep it level.  So you have removed all the seeds and all that yukky stuff and next you are going to tip your melon upside down to let all the excess liquid drain out.  You can wipe it out with a CLEAN piece of paper towel also.

 2. Next you need to boil some water to make your jelly. You will need about one cup.  Make your jelly by adding packet of crystals to hot water and stir like crazy.  I don't add any cold water to make it up to the litre, or whatever ever it is, but leave it strong.  The strawberries won't stay in the melon when you cut it if your jelly is too watered down.  While your jelly is cooling you can wash your strawberries and then take out the hulls and halve. Stick as many  strawberries as you can in your hollowed melon.



3.  When your jelly is nice and cool you can pour it into your melon.  Fill it up as much as possible and then put the lid back on. This will stop the top of the melon from drying out.  Put the whole thing in the fridge to set for a few hours. 

 4. Once the jelly has set in your melon you can cut it how you wish.  Don't cut the pieces too small, however, as the jelly and strawberries then tend to topple out of the piece of melon.  That wasn't the idea now was it. Otherwise you could have just had a piece of melon with jelly and strawberries.  You could serve this with ice cream or cream but I prefer it just as it.  Of course that is also much more healthy but if you wish to have ice cream or cream............Yeah right!  I'm just not that into ice cream and or cream.  Give me a sorbet any time. 
This recipe was given to my older sister by her friend Jenny a long time ago.  I bet my sister has forgotten all about it.  Actually my older sister has probably forgotten alot of things.  She is soooo much older than me!  ENJOY

Would you like a chocolate with that wine?

I'm not quite sure where I got this idea, but it can make giving a bottle of wine look just a little more exciting, that is if you are not my sister.  Nothing excites her like a bottle of wine.  Thank goodness she doesn't know about my blog!  Yep, she's the same one that says I have too much time on my hands. LOL

This is a nice easy project and  you can do your grapes in
whatever colour cellophane you like.  I have used  Maltesers but you could use any round chocolate.  You will, however, then need to cut the size of your squares of paper accordingly.


What you need:
round chocolates
Thin wires of approximately 10cm
1 florist wire
 Florist tape
 Cellophane in colour of choice


Cut squares of cellophane big enough to wrap around your chocolates.  Because I am a little 'arty farty' I like to do a contrasting colour for a few of the grapes just to give the bunch a bit of a glow.  Minimum of chocolates I would cover would be twenty.  Any less than this and your bunch will look a little sad.  You need to wrap your wire tight enough to keep the paper together but not so tight that you won't be able to pull your chocolates out of the bunch one at a time.

 When you have covered all your chocolates you can start twisting the grapes together with the bits of wire that were left poking out.  Start from the bottom grape and work your way to the top where the main stem would be.



If you need to trim a little of the cellophane away from your wrapped chocolates, do so before attaching the chocolate to the bunch. When you have joined them all together, by twisting all the wires into one neat wire, you will need to attach the florist wire to this.  Then cover all the wire with florist tape.  This will make the join look a little neater.

Make a loop of the wire.  Make it big enough to fit around your wine bottle. With the left over wire you can make a tendril by twisting it in little loops.  As you can see on the top photos, I have also added a few artificial green leaves.  These are ivy leaves but if you could find grape leaves that would look even better.
Enjoy and maybe don't forget to tell the person you are giving this gift to that the grapes are edible.  I've been making these for a few years and my husband looked surprised when I said I needed to take a photo of the completed chocolate thingies.  Chocolate thingies????? What chocolate thingies????? They've got chocolates in them????