www.handpickedcollection.com

We’re all aflutter here today in the Handpicked office because our latest catalogue will be delivered to our customers today. It’s full of beautiful things to fill your own home with and also lots of useful and pretty presents to give to other people. Look out for it when the post comes.

If you’ve received one in the past, your latest issue will be with you in the next few days. If not, then you can request a catalogue to be sent to you by filling in your details here. You can also browse the catalogue.

We hope you like it.

I’m not good at football lingo but I think they call this a hat trick. Our third consecutive win at the Venda ECMOD Direct Commerce awards for Best Gift Store. We were delighted with the result but a bit disappointed that the lovely Dermot Mernaghan wasn’t in our winners’ photo as the years previous. Apparently this was because of broken ribs from falling off his bike (was he worried we might grab him?).

But seriously it is a huge honour to be chosen for this prestigious award again. Other winners this year included Charles Tyrwhitt, Argos and Littlewoods so we were in excellent company. Nick Wheeler and Chrissie Rucker received a joint lifetime achievement award (what an amazing pair) and we much enjoyed Nick’s acceptance speech – he’s a funny guy.

Thank you ECMOD, we’re chuffed to bits.

Written by Natasha Cubitt, Managing Director, The Handpicked Collection

Your Meal

Easter is as good an excuse as any to invite lots of friends and family round for great meal on Sunday. Lamb is a traditional Easter dish and a leg joint will go far, but at Handpicked we’re all going to be ordering delicious smoked Scottish salmon from The Handpicked Foodstore.

A whole side of salmon starts at just £24.00 for a Supreme Centre Fillet; this 450g piece will keep your friends and family going as canapés with lemon and black pepper until you serve your roast.

Serve your salmon on our Board/Tray with Carving Knife. This has metal brackets which can be positioned above or below the board to become either a serving tray with handles or a chopping board with a stand.

Our Gravy Boat with a built in fat separator will be ideal for your roast. It is an ingenious device that miraculously saves you from having to use messy basters to skim the fat off gravy.

Your Table Decroations

Choose seasonal decorations to make your table look beautiful. Pussy Willow in large vases looks wonderful against a window or on the floor in a prominent place. Decorate by tying coloured ribbon round the branches or by spray painting gold or silver. Add feathers and spring flowers for more colour and more nature.

Daffodils are an iconic Spring flower and are available from most supermarkets for £1 for a generous bunch. Make them go even further by splitting the bunch into two or three and placing in our Small Sophie Allport Jugs and dotting around the table and area in which your guests will be.  This will not only be useful for many things after Easter, it is conveniently on sale at the moment.

Try traditional egg blowing (here’s good step by step guide http://www.wikihow.com/Blow-Out-Eggs) and make a day of painting them with poster paints. Put the eggs in glass bowls to show them off as much as possible or tie ribbon round them and hang from more Pussy Willow.

For a more grown-up table decoration, we found this great idea on Pinterest: decorate your Easter eggs with temporary tattoos.

If you happen to be on Pinterest you can follow us here: http://pinterest.com/handpickedc/

Spring cleaning your home doesn’t always mean hard labour starting at the top of the house and working your way to the front door with bin bags and several hoover bags. Here are our suggestions for making your home a little Springier, more organised and fresher.

Branche d’Olive Reed Diffuser £21.95

A simple way to add glamour to any room in the house. Put this on the hall table to give a glorious waft of pretty scent when you come home.

Lights & Darks Laundry Basket £124.95

Give yourself a new sense of organisation with our handsome Laundry Basket. We love its industrial style and it saves riffling through the dirty washing later down the line.

Pretty Washing Up Gloves £4.95 £2.48

Nothing really makes chores go any but giving these to a friend or your mum will put a smile on her face whilst she’s doing them. And they’re on Sale!

Hyacinth Vases £9.95

We sell three delicately coloured vases in green, clear and purple. Put these in a row along a bright kitchen windowsill and see them grow in their specially designed, pretty vases.

We think the fairest way to prove how good our fine food is, is to let you taste it! Which is why we’ve launched The Handpicked Foodstore Tasting Club over on our Facebook page.

We are always looking for willing volunteers to taste and review our fine food, from our award-winning smoked Scottish salmon to the original and best sea salted caramels.

If this sounds like the club for you, this is how it works:

• Hop over to and like our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/HandpickedFoodstore
• Every so often we will post a shout out for someone to review our chosen treat
• We’ll pick a volunteer and get their details so we can send a taster to them
• All you need to do is post your review on The Handpicked Foodstore Facebook wall (extra brownie points for photos!) to let everyone know whether we succeeded in tickling your taste buds.

We’re feeling peckish just thinking about it.

Here are our two reviews that we have received so far:

Ben Thapa:

‘I watched Michel Roux jnr the other day note that “anyone can cook a great dish with caviar and lobster, but it’s what you do with humble ingredients that counts”. That being the case, it must also therefore be that great ingredients need very little doing to it in order to shine. This was definitely the case with the smoked salmon I received from the Handpicked Foodstore.

‘I had decided in my head how I would serve the salmon for myself and my colleagues at the Wales International Academy of Voice: simply, on dark rye bread, with cream cheese and capers. Bold but complimentary flavours enabling the salmon to be the crowning glory.

‘We weren’t to be disappointed. Soft, buttery, textured salmon, with a light, not overpowering, perfume of smoke. Just the right level of fat was marbled through the fish: an indication that the product was of good quality and responsibly sourced. We were treated to a depth, richness and complexity of flavour that immeasurably surpasses what you would find in poor supermarket imitations. Black pepper and lemon were offered, but it was deemed that the elegant simplicity of the dish as it stood, crowned by a quality ingredient, needed no further embellishment in order to flourish.

‘Thank you so much to the Handpicked Foodstore for inspiring us to elevate the simple process of a working lunch into something gastronomically exquisite!’

Lucy Kroll:

To call in my lunchtime today I decided to try out your smoked salmon in my favourite way – on a bagel, with rocket, lemon and pepper. Rather too self-indulgent for a rainy Tuesday? who cares! The salmon is sliced beautifully thickly and is neither too greasy or too dry,which makes it a real treat to eat – you don’t need much more than two slices to fill you up. I would say it is on the saltier side of salty, which might not be to everyone’s taste, but the peppery rocket and acidity from the lemon helped to counteract this. I have eaten plenty of smoked salmon in my time, and this falls under the ‘yummy’ category. I would certainly recommend it!

Our brand new range of children’s gardening products is up on the site! Our Seedlets range is endorsed by Blue Peter gardener Chris Collins whose main aim in life is to encourage children of all ages outdoors to show them how much fun gardening can be. He has created the range with three different levels to suit different ages and abilities.

Beginners’ level is aimed at children aged between 3 and 5 and includes brightly coloured tools such as a plastic bucket and magnifying glass perfect for pint-sized hands.

Intermediate level is aimed at children aged 5 to 10 and includes some more hands-on exploration tools like sieve for searching through earth, a rain gauge and outdoor thermometer.

Seedlets Experts’ range is aimed at those getting more seriously into their new outdoor hobby. Carry out gardening projects with our sturdy range which includes rakes, spades, metal tools on a belt and kneeling pad for getting really stuck in.

Until the 20^th March 2013, The Handpicked Collection will be donating 10% of all sales of the Seedlets range to the charity Greenfingers. Here is some info about them:

Greenfingers (www.greenfingerscharity.org.uk) is a national charity based in Beaconsfield, dedicated to creating magical gardens for children’s hospices around the UK, to support children with life limiting conditions and their families.

Each hospice garden is specially designed by Greenfingers, working in partnership with hospice staff, volunteers, children and families to meet their range of needs. The charity creates gardens where children and families can play, enjoy time together, find space to reflect and get treatment away from the bedside – all outside in the fresh air. Below is an example completed last year in

Greenfingers is a registered charity no. 1076640.

One of the few blessings caused by the recent months (and months…) of wet weather are the enormous numbers of snowdrops. I can’t remember a better year for these beautiful first signs of spring, and there are so many that we’ve been enjoying them indoors for the last few weeks. Son Freddie, aged two and half, helped me pick some today and those that weren’t squidged have found a beautiful home in my Porcelain Bird Vase, £14.95. They make me smile every time I look at them, and help make me feel a tiny bit better about being permanently waterlogged since last April!

Earlier this month we introduced our brand new Gift Boxes. Seduce Me includes a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne, a box of tempting choccies and an indulgent Massage Candle, perfect for Valentines if that’s what you’re in the market for. If you missed out on seeing one of these beauties with gorgeous gifts lovingly nestled in smart black wood wool, lid on and silver Handpicked ribbon tied around in a bow, never fear, Mother’s Day is here. And don’t worry; we don’t expect you to present your Mother with a beautifully ribboned box entitled ‘Seduce Me’. We’re not into that. We are into the art of gift giving however, and we can pretty much guarantee that if you presented your mum with a ‘Treat Me’ or ‘Spoil Me’ Gift Box, you would be at the top of her brownie point list.

Treat Me is £44.95 but is in fact worth £50.80, contains a leather-bound book in which to write down your favourite quotes or sayings so as not to forget them, a pretty heart-shaped soap topped with a real rosebud, wrapped in pink tissue paper and gift boxed and a pretty, shiny heart charm on a silver chain. Each item is protected in black wood wool and put into a large navy blue gift box, a lid is put on and then 2.5m of Handpicked silver ribbon is wrapped round it and tied in a bow.

Other gift boxes, which make perfect gifts for Mother’s Day, are the Spoil Me Gift Box £99.95, worth £119.80, saving over 15%: sumptuously smelling Ortigia Bath Oil, a silk pillowcase and a pretty Pearl Tag Bracelet. Hug in a Box Gift Box £29.95, worth £33.90 saving over 10%: a mini heart hottie, Montezuma’s deliciously comforting hot chocolate powder, a big Love Mug and crumbly chocolate fudge. Or buy her the Relax Me Gift Box £44.90, worth £51.80, saving over £10% which houses a lavender infused silk eye mask, a  Cochine Frangipani & Neroli Candle and blissful This Works Bath Soak.

Mother’s Day is Sunday 10^th March 2013.

Shop all Mother’s Day Gifts. Shop all Gift Boxes.

I’ve never been taken out to dinner for Valentine’s Day. No violin serenades, rose petal-strewn table, pink champagne.

Thank goodness for that.

A good meal is one of the blessings of life. So why put yourself off your food by surrounding yourself with kissing couples? If you’re anything like me you’ll end up feeling so self-conscious about your lack of romantic lovely-woveliness that you end up choking on an oyster. Or having a ‘heated discussion’ about why oh why can’t you be more like that man on table 6 who has just presented his dinner companion with an orchid and plane tickets to Paris.

I prefer my romantic meals to happen at home. That way I control the menu, avert arguments about who gets to drink and who to drive, and don’t have to watch couples smooching spaghetti over each other. Apologies for that last image, but this Valentine restaurant phobia runs deep.

This Valentine’s Day is all planned. Smoked salmon on blinis with Naccarri caviar, washed down with Veuve Clicquot. Southport Potted Shrimps, then smoked Barbary duck breast with spicy redcurrant conserve. As a chaser we’ll enjoy Sipsmith’s smoothly delicious damson vodka, and if there’s any space left tuck into a From the Heart Chocolate Cake with Flowers. In my romantic world, spending hours slaving over a hot stove doesn’t feature, so food that needs minimum preparation, but gives maximum taste, is essential.

Did I mention all this would take place in the bath? Mercifully I left this small detail till the end. However, bathing and imbibing is another thing you can’t do in a restaurant, and until you can my Valentine motto is ‘honey, I’m home’.

Wrap up warm against the coming snow this weekend with our cosy cashmere and lovely accessories. All of these are in our fantastic New Year Sale!

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