Rawr Love Collection

Chocolate is one of the most traditional Valentines gifts and one that will always be appreciated by the receiver. It’s easy to see why: it tastes great, is a sensual experience to eat, and it’s endorphins make you feel great!

Giving chocolate is hardly a new tradition: it’s been given as a gift since Aztec times. Those Aztecs knew a thing of two about the link between chocolate and passion, considering it to elevate sexual power, and drinking cocoa at wedding ceremonies (following in their footsteps, Rawr has recently had their first wedding favours order).

Yet when most people give Valentines chocolate, they end up giving a load of refined sugar, emulsifiers, hydrogenated oils and generally unnatural ingredients to their loved one, plus a sugar crash post-consumption, and probably some guilty thoughts about wobbly thighs/bums/tummies. Not so sexy. With Rawr, you can be guaranteed, as always, a delicious, quality, high-cacao chocolate without any of the nasties.

If you’re looking for the ideal gift grab a bar or two of Rawr Passion (the heart-themed wrapper says it all), or even better, the Love Collection: 4 of our best-selling large bars (including Passion), wrapped with red organza ribbon and finished with a recycled card ‘Love’ label.

Raw recipe books can be a great resource, but there are also some excellent websites out there that offer raw food recipes for free! Here’s a few of the ones we use most here at Rawr:

1. Gone Raw. This was a staple website when we first starting eating raw. It’s perhaps not the easiest to search and use, but there are so many recipes listed and so many members that you’re bound to find something.

2. Raw Food Recipes. Easy to use and pictures for everything. It always helps to know what you’re making is meant to look like!

3. The Daily Raw Cafe. Again, beautiful pictures, and some really yummy recipes. This lady must spend all her free time making raw food and blogging about it!

4. Raw Food Living. Attractive website with lots of recipe ideas, including milks, dressings, mains, cheeses, desserts etc.

5. Loloville. No pictures, but lots of recipes.

6. Living Foods.

7. Have Raw Cake and Eat It. A fab website run by Annette, a raw fooder in the village next to ours.

8. We Like It Raw. Colourful recipe ideas.

A simple internet search will throw up many more websites. If you know of a good one, please feel free to comment and let me know!

Urban Larder opened just a short time ago on Halloween, and already stocks a wide and impressive range of local wholefoods and delicacies (including, from today, Rawr chocolate!). Unique in its incredibly cute location – a small shop surrounded by greenery and antiques in Hope Yard, with pink cake wallpaper – it’s well worth a visit. Lots of veggie and vegan treats on offer, and some gorgeous fresh fruit.

Here at Rawr we were super-excited last night to provide chocolate tasting entertainment at a corporate Christmas event, in none other than the beautiful King’s College. Visitors to Cambridge will know the distinctive college well, and had you access to the bar last night you would have seen lots of posh frocks and dinner jackets…and many hundreds of Rawr chocolate samples!

Party-goers were able to sample each of Rawr’s eight main flavours in cocktail-stick pierced portions, while they mingled, chatted, danced and drank. Chili Heatwave was a big favourite, as was our Christmas flavour – most people just worked their way down the eight plates, coming back for more later. One cheeky King’s student crashed the party, walking away with handfuls of Christmas and Purity when he thought noone was looking!

Many thanks to the wonderful Charlotte for bringing raw, vegan chocolate to the Lake District last Sunday. Here she is with her fab stall!

Dalton Xmas Market 2009

Summary: Adapted from Nomi Shannon and Sheryl Duraz’s ‘Raw Food Celebrations.’ Tangy, tasty courgette canapes, great for serving at raw parties or just for a posh looking dinner for yourself (which is what we made them for!). The end result is quite oniony – feel free to skip some or all of the onions if you’re not keen. Makes 18 courgette roll-ups.

Rawr in the Snow

Rawr Chocolate’s taking a trip to the Lake District this Sunday (29th November) to attend the Dalton Christmas lights switch-on and Christmas tree festival.

You’ll find our close friend and self-elected chocolate promoter in the grounds of Dalton’s United Reformed Church, her stall well stocked with every Rawr flavour, including Rawr Christmas and our Christmas Gift Collection.

The market will run from 2-6pm, before the Christmas Parade.

Lily Mouse

Okay, so animals can’t eat chocolate, even if it is raw. But they can definitely eat raw food. And given that raw food is a wonderful health insurer in this world where pets are now as cancer and disease-ridden as people, the Rawr mice have been going raw!

Houdini, Lily and Daisy made their way to the Rawr fold from Wood Green Animal Shelters back at Easter. For the first couple of months, they ate the traditional mouse diet: pre-packed, additive-filled, heat-treated hamster or gerbil mix, from which they’d pick the tastiest bits (generally the seeds and anything that looked alive). But then I thought – why am I, knowing all about raw food, feeding my cancer-prone mice this most unnatural, dead diet?

Having done my research, the mouse trio now eat nothing but natural food, and nothing but raw. They love it. On a daily basis they get raw oats, buckwheat, quinoa, alfalfa seeds (they like them sprouted too!), rye, pot barley, millet seed, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, flax seeds and green lentils. For an occasional treat they also get hemp seeds, a whole almond, or to lick raw coconut butter from my fingers!  And every other day they get a selection of the organic veggies we have in the fridge – the clever things know to eat their dark greens and especially love spinach, kale and calvolo nero, while not being too bothered by anything sweet like fruit. When it’s not too wet out I’ll pick them a box of fresh grass and dandelions – they love the dandelion flowers.

My trio are flourishing on this diet, and it’s proven to me just how great natural eating is. The mice seem to instinctively know what’s good for them, and I think people would too if their bodies weren’t so thrown out of balance by refined sugar,  over-processed foods, and all the rest. Eating this way and living in a chemical-free environment, hopefully Houdini, Lily and Daisy will live their mouse lives free of the diseases which catch so many of their pet friends.

p.s. Note to Environmental Health and landlords! Much as I loved ‘Ratatouille’, mice and chocolates are kept in quite different houses, so there is no danger of a reenactment.