Movie Snacks

Colourful chocolate slabs and salty cinnamon popcorn.

I love going to the movies, the pictures, the film house. There's something about allowing yourself to switch off completely from the outside world- no scrolling, no liking, no tagging- that's almost therapeutic. And what better therapy than laughter? We chose to watch the new comedy, Johnny English Strikes Again.

It scored pretty poorly across critic reviews: 39% Rotten Tomato, 6.6/10 IMD and 3/5 Mirror, suffering reviews of this sort:

"Delivers little besides laboured jokes, a moronic plot and characters so thinly drawn they make Mister Bean look like the work of prime-time Ingmar Bergman." -Stephen Dalton, Hollywood Reporter, September 30, 2018

"The best thing in the picture is Emma Thompson playing an exasperated Prime Minister who finds Mr English about as funny as food poisoning. Join the queue, love."- Allison Rowat, The Herald (Scotland), October 8, 2018

"Thin on plot, not too long, no bad language and with enough silly jokes and visual gags to keep the average medium-age child amused... I just don't think it was intended as such." -Aine O'Connor, Sunday Independent (Ireland), October 8, 2018

Perhaps I'm moronic; have the mind of a child; or just excited that I had pre-made snacks secretly stuffed in our bag, because I loved it. Yes, the plot was weak and predictable, the characters cliché and one-dimensional- but it didn't matter. You don't watch Johnny English for subtle plot twists or hard-to-grasp characters. You watch it for Atkinson's comical genius, the silliness of it all and the Bond satire. For me, there were barely any lulls between funny scenes; the film flowed pretty well. My favourite had to be the Virtual Reality escapade, which despite its slapstick nature, was actually precisely choreographed, even down to picking up breadsticks in the place of batons and beating the shop assistant with them. I laughed so much I choked on my own cinnamon popcorn.

Check out my easy-peasy cinema snacks to make before you go. The salt from the butter combined with the sugar and cinnamon, makes this popcorn one of my favourite snacks. And the chocolate slabs are very aesthetically pleasing and very nibble-able!

Cinnamon Popcorn:

Ingredients:

• Large knob of salted butter

• 2 tsp cinnamon (more for sprinkling)

• 100g Popcorn kernels

• 4 tsp Golden caster sugar

Instructions:

1. Melt the butter in a large pan with a securely fitted glass lid over a medium heat. Add the cinnamon.

2. Add the popcorn kernels. Shake every so often to avoid burning. Wait for the pops!

3. When the popping subsides, leave to rest for 1 min with the lid still on.

4. Place popcorn in a freezer bag and shake with sugar and more cinnamon.

Chocolate Slabs:

Ingredients (makes 2 slabs):

• 200g white chocolate

• 200g milk chocolate

• 200g dark chocolate

• Sweets to decorate (I used smarties, crunchy M&M's and crunchy caramel M&M's)

Instructions:

1. Melt the chocolate in 3 separate bowls in the microwave, stirring after 30 second bursts.

2. Marble in a rough rectangular slab shapes on the baking trays. Drizzle, spread or swirl the chocolate to create different patterns.

3. Decorate how you please with colourful sweets.

4. Set in a cool place and once hard, chop roughly into triangle shapes.

Lights, camera, (food), action! Enjoy! x