Hope and Greenwood

Hope and Greenwood have now officially launched ‘operation cucumber’ and are actually LIVE on the OCADO website!

Our shop-within-a-shop tells you all about our Heritage, the Best of Blighty, Miss Hope’s encounters…Miss Hope’s Recipes…Traditional Sweets, Perfect Pressies, Fudge and Truffles and more.

Now you can pop some Hope and Greenwood sweets in amongst your toilet roll and tapioca. Ray will deliver your sweets in the Onion Van. Ray fantasises about a marshmallow van with a furry dash and a stiletto accommodating clutch.

This splendid Hope and Greenwood Sweet Shop has been a secret project of some duration, motoring North in the Morris, without outriders and at my own expense. The M1 stretches ahead, my Versace flapping in the wind, turning left at The Galleria, home of the tracksuit bottom and food in buckets.

If you wish to access Ocado/Cucumber Towers you must do battle with the security barrier activated by swiping a security keycard or cheese sandwich.  It is ruled by Mr Jason Gissing, Cucumber God, who patiently keeps a 24 personal webcam watch in the hope I will scratch my Mulberry.

There is a whisper that Mr Gissing has also webcam access to the lounges of several million satisfied housewives. That would account for the yearly sales of 1.7 million cucumbers.

Find us on your tinternet and pop in and see us here…

Hope and Greenwood has opened its first store in October in the refurbished Lumine building in Yurakucho, Ginza district in Tokyo. This has been quickly followed by 11 more Hope and Greenwood outlets in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Osaka, Kanagawa, Saitama and Miyagi.

The programme will see a rollout of a minimum of 25 Hope and Greenwood stores within the first 3 years.

It appears that the Japanese market can’t get enough of this iconic British brand. They love the traditional styling and clever packaging. Hope and Greenwood’s British quirkiness suits the Japanese taste and is aesthetically spot-on for a nation renowned for its attention to detail. Designed in-house by Miss Hope, Hope and Greenwood’s jolly packaging is infused with humour and playfulness and the recipes for their confections come direct from the combined imagination of Miss Hope and Mr Greenwood.

This is a big thumbs-up for UK export.
British to the core, Hope and Greenwood source its confections and packaging from Britain.

The air is crisp with the promise of sleigh bells, robins hop noiselessly in the berry filled firs. Deep in the kitchens of Sugar HQ I am creating some splendid sugar mice to delight and transfix my guests at lunch on the big day. They are easy-peasy to make so here is the recipe.

Here are some other festive tasks for your kind attention;

1. Have a sherry.
2. Hang each new Christmas card on cheery, red ribbon over crackling log fire.
3. Roast some chestnuts.
4. Buy some chestnuts.
5. Spray some acorns silver.
6. Wash glitter pen out of your hair.
7. Buy your mother a really expensive scarf, which she will re-gift to you next Christmas, win, win.
8. Use expensive scarf to put out Christmas card fire.

Takes about 20 minutes to make.
Makes about 12-16 meeces

1 Egg White (or powdered egg white if you prefer)                                                                                                                       450g (1lb) Icing Sugar
2-3 tiny drops of Pink Food Colouring
5-6 drops of Strawberry flavouring
Edible Silver balls
String cut into 10cm (4 inch) lengths

Please beat the egg white until frothy but not stiff. Have a sherry.

Drop in the flavouring and pink colour and stir. Go easy.

Kindly sieve the icing, adding enough to produce a fairly stiff fondant mixture.

It may be more or less than 450g, depending on the size of the egg white.

Lightly dust your work surface with icing sugar. Knead the mixture into a firm paste and divide into 12 - 16 pieces. Sherry glass is looking a bit empty.

Roll the pieces into oval shapes. Press a piece of string into the ball, pressing the fondant around the ‘tail’ to secure it.

Make one end pointed to form a nose, pinch up two small pieces to produce cute ears. Practice makes perfect.

Feel free to use silver balls for eyes or go off-piste and paint them with black food colour. You may also wish to add a moustache, I know I do. Further titillation may stretch to dipping in them in chocolate and giving them a jaunty sugar flower ‘hat’ depending on how many sherries you have had.

Place the mice onto parchment or silicon paper, place in a warm place to dry for 24 hours. Store in an airtight container.

Do not feed sugar mice cheese, sugar mice do not eat cheese.

Mr Greenwood’s Gloucester Old Spot

This week we have teamed up with our chums at Fru.

We have twenty Jamboree Hampers filled with Hope and Greenwood treats to be won, worth £25 each.

Share them out or throw caution to the wind and satisfy your own sweet tooth…

Just click here to enter
http://www.frupuds.com/

 H&G have teamed up with Anorak to create an enormous Bunny Trunk of Easter sweets worth £150.00!
To enter the competition just hop along to;
http://www.anorakonline.co.uk/

A short Hope and Greenwood film about cakes, magic and excess sherry.

A little film about naughty, sugar mice and our recipe book Life is Sweet.

We are taking a jaunt through town on our way to building a Pop-Up Sweet Shop for Stella McCartney. As we weave through the white knuckle ride that is central London Mr. Greenwood is fantasising about excessive force, which makes a change from excessive breasts.

‘Bazooka, Exocet, Surface to Air, Glock 17, Oozy 9 mm,’ he snarls at a teenaged drug dealer in a blacked-out Fiat Punto, ‘rocket propelled grenade launcher, something big that explodes heads.’

Trafalgar Square whizzes by, lions incumbent with tourists. Lower Regent Street’s chicane snakes north.

‘I bet you would have a Smith and Wesson pearl handled girl-gun’ he bellows.

‘A balloon whisk,’ I retort brightly, clinging onto the dash board.

‘What,’ he brays incredulously, ‘beat them until stiff?’

If you are following my blog you will know that I am rather fond of Katie Price. She has balls almost as magnificent as mine.

It was a splendid moment, therefore, chez Greenwood when Mr G spotted Katie on da telly surrounded by Selfridges bags (and wearing a co-ordinating yellow track suit) with no less than four Hope and Greenwood Tuck Shop Jars in her pile of Christmas gifts. And more exciting still when she wiggled a jar to camera and proclaimed, ‘These sweets look lovely, I’m going to eat them all!’

From: Ruby  ruby@yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: 14 March 2011 19:57
To: Miss Hope
Subject: ConfectionERY Alphabet

Dear Miss Hope

I love Hope and Greenwood and thought you would like to see my Hope and Greenwood Alphabet.

I’ll have you know that it’s Me that created it (I like beginning Me with a capital letter, it makes Me sound special).

The H & G Alphabet!

A = Awfully Delicious

B = British at its Best

C = ConfectionEry (nobody seems to spell it right)

D = Dirty Dishes from making chocolate…

E = Elephant (the managing directors loyal friend)

F = Funbags of Fabulous Sweeties!

G = Gummy Bears!

H = Huge Hampers (*licking lips*)

I = I’m not sure about this one…

J = JELLIES!!!

K = Kitty Hope - Our boss

L = Lost in LollyLand…

M = Chocolate cookies - Mmmm…

N = Nougat - My teacher’s favorite

O = Old Fashioned - We love that stuff

P = Practically Perfect in every way

Q = Queens Afternoon tea

R = Rose Buds - one of my favorites (you thought I was going to do Ruby didn’t you?)

S = Sherbet Fountains! (I love liquorice)

T = Terrific Toffees!

U = Your famous fancy underwear…

V = Vanilla fudge!!! My fave!

W = Warm Sunday cocoa - mmmm…

X = Xylophones… er… chocolate ones?

Y = Yoyo’s - the old 1960’s toy

Z = Zebras they remind me of humbugs…

Lots of Love,

Ruby (aged 10)