Hot Chocolate Advent Calendar
I have always got the girls a special advent calendar, something a bit more special than a cheap chocolate one from the supermarket. When they were small it was Baby Born or Lego, last year the eldest had a Yankee Candle one and the younger had a cheap jewellery one from Primark. This year the eldest has developed a love of proper tea, and I found that The English Tea Company do an advent calendar.
Brilliant, it even came as a two pack, so DH can have one too. But what to do for the younger one. She drinks tea, but only in a “milk, two sugars” sense. She does love hot chocolate though. I hunted through the interweb, there are so many different advent calenders available in the past few years than there used to be, but I couldn’t find a hot chocolate one, so I decided to make my own, and now I’m going to talk you through how to do it too.
The first thing was to get a lot of hot chocolate sachets, in as many different flavours as I could find. One Tesco internet shop later and I had 24 sachets in 15 different flavours. I found a cardboard box from an amazon order, and cut 24 slots in it, (Then I had to go back and make them a bit bigger, those sachets are bigger than you’d think.) They ended up roughly 6cm x 1.5cm. Just make sure your biggest sachets can fit.
This is it half way through;
The I cut 9 pieces of card. Seven are the same width as the box, two are the same height. With a little help from DH, lines were measured, 7 evenly spaced lines on the longer ones, and two on the shorter ones. Cut a slot along the line from one edge to the middle. Here’s one of the shorter ones:
Then assemble all the bits of card into a grid and if you have measured properly it should slide into the box and give you 24 compartments.
Next up is decorating the box. I used some shiny wrapping paper, but you could paint it, or whatever you prefer.
I used a glue stick and covered the front of the box in glue (I would have prefered to use PVA, but I couldn’t find it.) I put the box down in the middle of the paper and pressed down until it was all smooth, and then left it to dry. Then I wrapped the paper up the side, as if I was wrapping a present, but left the back uncovered to help with filling the calendar later.
To cut the slots in the paper, I took the cardboard grid out and used a craft knife to cut the slots from the inside.
This is how it looked from the outside;
I put glue on the paper covering the slots from the inside, then I used a blunt pencil to push the paper into the slots from the outside. The pencil can get right into the corners and can give a good edge. Smooth the paper down into the glue and leave it to dry.
The next thing to do is prepare the hot chocolate sachets to go in the calendar.
I cut 24 bits of different shiny paper, it was actually an old gift bag, into pieces 8cm x 6cm as the biggest sachets were just under 6cm wide
Then I folded the paper into thirds, and using a glue gun, stuck them to one end of each sachet leaving one third sticking up.
The bit that is sticking up will stop the sachet falling all the way into the box, and gets the number put on it. It took awhile, but eventually I had a box of 24 sachets all with a paper tab at one end.
The last thing to do is work out what order you want to drink all that lovely hot chocolate, making sure that you separate any duplicate flavours so you don’t end up drinking the same thing two night in a row, and then number the tabs.
The first thing I tried was just a number sticker onto the paper, but it didn’t show up very well against the busy pattern, so I found some sequins and used those for a background.
The numbers stuck to the sequin and then I used double sided sticky tape to stick the sequin to the sticking up bit of paper. Push the sachets into the slots, you may find it easier to gently pull them in from the back of the box, and you’re nearly done. Seal the back of the box and cover it in more paper, and that’s it, one Hot Chocolate Advent Calendar.
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