Giveaway: CBTL by The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf

As you know, all month I’m sharing my fabulous Father’s Day/Graduation gift idea finds and giving them away — and today, I’m all about the CBTL single-beverage system by The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

cbtl Giveaway: CBTL by The Coffee Bean & Tea LeafThis brewing system is not just sexy and high-tech: It is designed to be used exclusively with The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf hand-selected premium espresso, coffee and hand-plucked whole-leaf tea capsules, to hand-craft your perfect cup of coffee. CBTL accessories include a one-touch milk frother, whisk, and a complete set of all 12 flavors of assorted coffees, espressos and teas.

I get to travel to LA every few months, and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf is one of my favorite haunts – and one of my favorite coffee spots worldwide! . It’s so simple to use  too: Just place a capsule into the machine, select a cup size and press a button & your beverage are ready to be serve. Besides making espresso, brewed coffee, you can also brewed tea by using this machine.

Want to try it for yourself? I’m doing an awesome giveaway: Win the CBTL kaldi system, the CBTL Milk Frother and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf capsules! It’s such a great gift idea, that you may want to gift it to yourself!

To have your chance to win this prize, please follow @AlyWalansky AND @TheCoffeeBean on Twitter, and then tweet us with your very favorite Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf beverage — I’m personally all about their blended iced mocha! Deadline to enter is May 15.

Create your own custom chocolate bar at Chocomize.com

chocolate 300x239 Create your own custom chocolate bar at Chocomize.com

Emails, software and gadgets are so… not delicious. But with Chocomize.com, there’s finally a tastier use for technology that even technophobes and “Luddites” will get behind.

MORE on GLOSS:  Technophobe Jennifer Aniston gets a Geek Makeover – our top picks for the star

Chocomize.com lets you channel your inner Willy Wonka to create your own chocolate bar concoctions, customized using your dark, milk or white chocolate and up to five different ingredients. Choose from hundreds of nuts, fruits, dried herbs, candy and more to create one of the 15 billion possible unique combinations.

The site offers traditional ingredients – almonds, dried fruit and mini pretzels, etc., but those with more adventurous palettes will enjoy the bolder options available, such as curry powder, mini chipotles, and even beef jerky (!).  If the idea of wielding this much choosing power is too overwhelming, Chocomize also offers a small selection of “Popular Flavors” such as the Summer Chocolate Bar – white chocolate with toffee bits and M&M candies.

MORE on GLOSS: Thomas Keller’s decadent chocolate bouchon recipe and mix

The website is very user-friendly so even those lacking any computer savvy can navigate with ease. Once you’ve created your delicious (or really weird) chocolate masterpiece, give it a name and have it shipped directly ($6.95 flat fee) to you or someone as a gift.

Okay, so we’re no gourmet chef (we’ll leave to yumGLOSS) but we did whip up a bar of our own.
Behold – the “geekGLOSS Byte Cruncher”:
Milk chocolate with almonds (for sustenance), sour cherries (we’ll consider it a serving of fruit), Nerds candy (of course) and a dash of ground coffee (nectar of the Tech Gods).

As Homer Simpson would say, “Mmm… technology.”