Strawberry Santas

As all good cooks know, the perfect accompaniment to a chocolate cake is the humble strawberry. In an appropriately festive mood, Acacia and I decided that we would try something a bit different and make strawberry Santas to guard our Christmas chocolate cake from those wishing to consume it :D

After some extensive research (all 2 minutes of it), we realised that a recipe wasn't really necessary. Some experimentation later and the little strawberry people were born. 

Ingredients: 

• millions of strawberries
• cream cheese (beaten)
• hundreds and thousands
• silver cachous 

The hulls were removed with a knife, which gave the Santas flat bottoms to sit on. Then the top 1/3 of the strawberry was removed to form the hat. A butter knife was used to position the cream cheese for the face, the 'hat' replaced and a small blob of cream cheese placed on the tip of the strawberry as a cute pom-pom.

We decided on silver cashous as buttons, and just pressed them firmly into the strawberry to fix them on. Unfortunately, some of the silver rubbed off leaving the cashous white underneath, but this wasn't extremely noticeable, and the white looked just as good. 

The cashous were too large to be used as eyes, so Acacia and I decided to use hundreds and thousands instead, which had the added bonus of providing a bit of variety. Some evil red-eyed Santas may have been created... :D

If we make these again, which I'm sure we will, substituting chocolate sprinkles for eyes would probably work better, as the dye on the hundreds and thousands started to run in the hot weather.