Ikea Hack: Bedside Pocket

When we moved into our apartment this year, we noticed that our new bedroom was a bit smaller than our old one. Seventy-five percent of the room is taken up by our giant bed, so it can get a little cramped.

I had to give up the luxury of having a night stand, and the closest thing I have is a little book shelf on the wall near my side of the bed. However, it's just outside of easy grasp, so if I want to put my glasses and book down there at night, I have to get all the way out of bed to do it (especially hard on a cold night). I generally just end up throwing stuff on the floor until there's a tiny mountain of books and chapsticks.

IKEA stuff is so cheap and simple, it makes it easy for hacking into other off-the-label uses. We recently got the Flort, a pocket that you can hang off the side of your couch to store remote controls. I got to thinking that it would be really great to hang one of those off the side of my bed, but would it be wide enough to store books that I'm reading?

I knew I'd have to rip a few seams to get what I wanted, but I had to be strategic. Each pocket is pleated in order to accommodate larger remote controls. This is a problem because if I ripped out all of the middle seams that separated the remotes, I would have one giant pocket, but it might have so much extra fabric from the pleating that my books would fall out.

I decided to just cut away the right and left inner seams to give me two medium pockets. I didn't even use a seam-ripper, just cut away with a cheap serrated knife. As you can see, the Flort hack is working out very well for me. I have enough room to store a book in one pocket and I use the other pocket to store my glasses and the remote control for my alarm clock. No more fumbling around outside of my bed when it's cold!

Norman Love Chocolates #20: Mint Chocolate Chip

Mint and chocolate are normally not my favorite combination, but I can handle it. I was interested to try the Mint Chocolate Chip confection, and I really liked the speckled-egg outer shell. (Although it makes me sad that somewhere there may be a chocolate bird looking for her delicious babies.)

The flavor was nice and smooth, a little like creme de menthe. Apparently the truffle part is a vanilla mint, and it had just the right combination of sweetness and mintiness. Not enough to overwhelm the truffle, but just enough to make your mouth a tiny bit tingly afterwards. Also, the chocolate chips on the inside were a nice touch and helped to balance out the flavor. Another very nicely made chocolate!

Norman Love Chocolates #19: White Vanilla Truffle

I was not looking forward to eating the White Vanilla Truffle, but up till now I have been able to suck it up and eat chocolates I thought I might not enjoy, but then I actually did enjoy them. I have a pretty wide range of tastes that I enjoy, and I like to be adventurous, so I was up for the challenge.

On a side note, not only does this chocolate sound scarily unappetizing to me, but it also looks like a kidney stone. What have I gotten myself into?


First of all, I actually really like vanilla in a lot of things. I add extra vanilla extract to my baked desserts and one of my favorite frozen yogurt flavors is just plain vanilla (or sweet cream). However, I already think that white chocolate is too sweet, and I didn't want to combine that with the already-sweet vanilla truffle.

Honestly, this was the worst chocolate I've had in this collection so far. It tasted like that sugary frosting that comes on store-bought cakes. Sometimes I'm in a sugary frosting mood, but not when I order really high-quality chocolates. I think this would have been so much better if the shell had been an intensely dark chocolate to counterbalance the sweet vanilla.

Norman Love Chocolates #18: Venezuelan Dark

There really isn't much to mention about this 66% Venezuelan Dark chocolate truffle that I haven't said before about dark chocolate, except for the fact that there are few things nicer than a truly well-made dark chocolate truffle. This one has more dark chocolate than the Dark Chocolate Cream Truffle that I tried, but I enjoy the extra-chocolatey bitterness so I knew I'd like this one.

Also, I like how artsy this chocolate is. If I was a kid and I still played with Barbies, I'd probably make this one into some sort of special occasion cake (I would say wedding cake but my Barbies were too busy fighting with Ken for that to happen, unless the story was like a spectacularly-bad Lifetime-esque wedding/cheating scandal. Yes, I was a creative child.)


It was pretty much exactly as I expected. There was a nice thin outer shell and the inside was as smooth as silk. There really isn't a word I can use to fully describe the texture. Well actually, I can, but it's gross if you don't like sushi. For those of you who are intense sushi-lovers (like me), it's like eating a really nice piece of Salmon sashimi (that is, just the fish without the rice). It had a very nice smooth/buttery feel but with chocolate instead of fish. (See, I told you it wasn't a great analogy.)

I thought this chocolate tasted a little sweeter than a dark chocolate normally does, and sure enough, I hadn't fully read the description before I ate it all up. Apparently it has been slightly enhanced with plum, coffee, and sweet raisin. That doesn't sound like a great combination, but I really couldn't taste the individual flavors, just the sweetness.

Two thumbs-coated-with-melted-chocolate up!

Norman Love Chocolates #17: Milk Chocolate Truffle

This planetary chocolate is the Milk Chocolate Truffle, described as having "nothing by fine, rich Swiss milk chocolate". Apparently, the reason that you always hear about "Swiss milk chocolate" being the best is because the first solid milk chocolate was invented by Swiss confectionier Daniel Peter. His method involved adding condensed milk to the chocolate, and this was an innovation because up until that point milk chocolate had only been available as a beverage.

I'm not such a huge fan of milk chocolate. It's like when I first started drinking wine and developing my palate. I really enjoyed the sweet wines (I think I even bought an Arbor Mist once), but then as I started drinking more wines my taste began to drift to the dry side, and now I really enjoy reds, although I still stick to semi-dry. In the same way my taste in wine has gone towards the bitter side, so has my taste in chocolate because I only choose to buy darks now. But since this is in my assorted box, the rule is that I am obligated to try it.

The interior was fudgy and it didn't melt easily in my mouth, which is good. It was an exquisite milk chocolate, and it's the kind of chocolate that really makes you realize that you've never had a good milk chocolate truffle before. Sort of like when I still liked wines with sugar added (the thought makes me a little sick now) and then I had my first sip of a smooth semi-dry wine and I realized that dry wines were not my enemies.

Norman Love Chocolates #16: Pistachio Cherry

I was happy to try the Pistachio Cherry chocolate, mainly because I've never tried this flavor combination before and I like to try new things.

This isn't my first experience with pistachio fillings though--I minored in German and have a love for German and Austrian foods. There is a type of chocolate made in Austria called Mozartkugeln that have pistachio nougat. I used to really like them because of their foreignness, but one day I overate a bunch of them and now I can't eat them. So, hopefully this isn't the same thing!

The inside was creamy with a dollop of cherry on top, and honestly it tasted more like a cherry-cheese danish than anything else. If I didn't know it was pistachio I don't think I would've guessed it. But it was good enough and I really appreciated the cherry on the top because it gave it a nice little tartness to balance out the creaminess.

Norman Love Chocolates #15: Pumpkin

It's winter in New England, and while I may not be craving mango, this is normally the time of year that I crave pumpkin. When I was in college, it never failed that if it was fall or winter and I saw a jar of something pumpkin-y, I would buy it. My craving has curbed a little bit since then, but I still love pumpkin pie (doused with whipped cream, of course). So, a pumpkin chocolate? Sure, why not! I'm up for it.

Another thing I do every year is to buy a pie pumpkin (or "sugar pumpkin") in anticipation of making a pumpkin pie completely from scratch. Of course, the pumpkin ends up becoming a decoration in my kitchen and usually sticks around for a period of time well past winter, and then I throw it out because it's bad. I've done this at least three times already--seriously, I am a huge impulse food shopper, especially when it comes to kitschy farmers' market items.

To be honest, I wasn't all that impressed with the flavor of this chocolate. It tasted more custardy than pumpkiny (even looked like it, from the inside), with a strong nutmeg aftertaste. The pumpkin did not mask the flavor of the white chocolate shell, so I had that to deal with too, which is probably why this chocolate was not one of my favorites. One of the things I like about pumpkin pie is that it's creamy and not so sweet (especially because I build an igloo of whipped cream around it), but this chocolate was just too sweet and not that pumpkiny. In the mean time, I'll just stick to my pie.