My guilty pleasure: a chocolate blizzard

It is my weakness and something to which I just can’t say no. Especially when it has a mouthwatering name such as ‘chocolate explosion’ or a ‘chocolate fudge blizzard’. Who can resist that? Not me.

My guilty pleasure is – and I fear always will be – chocolate, but I think I enjoy it more than most people.

Top of my list would be the milk chocolate kind containing some sort of crunchy nut, probably hazelnuts.

But I will happily tuck into the more bitter dark chocolate and, for a change, a bar of creamy white chocolate.

There is one important rule when a chocolate bar arrives in the house and that is it must go straight into the fridge. Cold and cool chocolate is the best.

There is also another rule I abide by. Never, not even once, look on the back of the wrapper as this will reveal the calorie count and cause guilt to set in.

We usually have a small section of the fridge where chocolate is stored as a treat for my daughters or to reward good behaviour. Of course, it is also there to reward my good behaviour too. You know, like when I eat all my dinner or when I put the washing out on the line.

OK, maybe I reward myself a little too often, but I’m not the only one who loves it.

My eldest daughter Caitlin would eat chocolate all day long if her mum and I let her, and five-year-old Alyssa has also inherited her dad’s love of the stuff.

For me, a self-confessed chocoholic, it is probably not a good thing for so much chocolate to be in the house.

I worry that if left alone with my ravenous appetite for chocolate I could eat the lot and I’d have to reinforce the floorboards to cater for my new weight.

Of course, since becoming a dad there is now another special day of the year to look forward to that feels like a second birthday, Father’s Day.

Last week my daughters asked what I would like as a gift. After some thought I simply asked them to surprise me.

But it seems they know their dad extremely well because on Sunday, the day all great fathers are celebrated, I was presented with not one but two bars of Dairy Milk Whole Nut. I couldn’t have asked for a better gift.

But of course, as my daughters seem to have inherited my great love for chocolate, it was only right that I let them have a piece.

A small piece of course... must think about their teeth.

Outgunned by the water babies

According to the astronomical calendar we are now officially in summer as it began yesterday. But, if you go by the meteorological calendar, summer actually began on June 1.

But for me there are a few signs that signal the start of summer. There is the sound of the ice cream van arriving outside your house, the smell of barbecues wafting through the air and that sound of someone walking behind you wearing flip flops.

Summer felt like it began recently on a day when the sun was shining, the air was warm and all windows were pushed open.

My daughters requested that we make our way to the garden for a full-on water fight. This is something I’ve not done for about 20 years. The main object is to soak your opponent using buckets and balloons full of water. They had balloons and I had the bucket. It was so much fun and another perk of being a parent.

But with two against one, guess who got drenched the most. Yes, me.