Aldi appear to have joined the rest of the big names in launching a big, fat baby event with massive discounts on a wide range of baby products and necessities. Like Tesco, Sainsburys, Argos et al, Aldi have thrown down the price gauntlet and parents get to enjoy all sorts of tasty goodies. If these Baby Events keep going on, you can literally just shop for baby at each event and never buy full price again, ha!

• Click here to visit the Aldi Baby Event

As you scroll down the page of the Aldi site you’ll soon see a long list of Baby Event offers, discounts and deals. There are some things that sit at exceptional value. Three sleepsuits for £4, two bodysuits for under £2, Tommee Tippee feeding items for under £1, and plenty of extra bits and pieces for baby caring on a budget.

The Aldi Baby event only starts on Thursday though, so don’t get too excited and barrel over there right now. Hang on a tick…

Thanks to mocmocamoc at HUKD!

These reward kits for kids are a genius investment in my view, especially as they get older and increasingly stubborn about doing their chores. The children’s reward packs at Aldi are only £1.99 per pack and are a brilliantly cheap investment in their future good behaviour.

• Click here to get rewarded with Aldi

The children’s reward packs at Aldi come with a chart that’s smothered in pretty pictures and has stars and stickers that can be added as they do well in their chosen areas. I find that my daughter is responding really well to her reward chart and will definitely be nabbing some of these.

The other reason these are great as kids get older is that bad behaviour can see you removing a sticker too. We have a chart that has both a good and bad column so if she gets five good stars she gets a surprise, and five bad stars mean she loses a toy.

Thanks to robkd14 at HUKD!

Apart from food, Aldi often offer seasonal specials, and at the moment, they have some great (and some not so great) Christmas activities and entertainment kits for children available.  We’ve been reviewing four items from Aldi’s Christmas range for the last few weeks.

First out the box was the Marvin’s Magic ‘Fifty Pranks To Freak Your Friends’ kit.

It looks like fun, and at the top of the neatly packed box is a sponge thing – I later found out was meant to be a rock – and a book with fifty tricks you can pull.

This year I’ve been on a mission to find the best priced Christmas products with the best tastes for your table. My first taste test took me to Aldi where I got the Luxury All Over Iced Christmas Cake for £6.99. This is a very reasonable price for this sized of cake and weighs in at 58.3p per 100g. Compared to the £8.50 of the Tesco Iced Rich Fruit Cake for the same weight, it is considerably cheaper.

This year I’ve made my own Christmas cakes, they are my benchmark. How will these pre-made Christmas cakes fare against the traditional Delia recipe I’ve used? Well, pretty good actually. The cake is well packaged and easy to unwrap and get into. The layer of marzipan and icing is definitely NOT stingy, and the lovely decorations are a delightful touch.

The fruitcake is rich and moist, lots of nuts and fruit so no stinting there, but, for me, it is overly sweet. This opinion was not shared by the other people I gave slices to, however, with everyone else commenting on how it was pretty much spot on.

Overall, I’d have to say that the Aldi Luxury Christmas cake is surprisingly good and one I would definitely purchase. The next thing on the list from Aldi was, of course, their mince pies. The packaging looks inviting and rich and doesn’t leak sugar everywhere – a big plus.

These mince pies are alright. As a mince pie fanatic I am very fussy and unfortunately the pastry is not firm and crumbly enough, it feels too soft. The filling is divine but the pastry lets the side down. However, when you compare their lovely 99p to the £1.50 of the Tesco range, well, the pastry isn’t that much of a hindrance – you can always bung them in the oven to crisp it up a bit first.

And if you head on over to their Facebook page they are giving away £100 vouchers in their Trolley Dash competition which you can, obviously, spend on Christmas cake and mince pies!

We all know that there’s not as much money around this Christmas, and we know that some people are really struggling to make ends meet, never mind actually planning an overflowing Christmas. Even if there’s not much under the tree, anyone that celebrates would probably still love the opportunity for quality time and a good meal with their loved ones.

When Aldi launched their new Facebook page they sent us a gift basket filled with Christmas treats, and we shared the love with PlayPennies mum, Tabitha.

“Reviewing food is highly personal,” says Tabitha, “and creating a gift basket even more so. I gave these products a rating based on how they work as part of an actual gift you made up for someone.”

That sounds pretty logical to us, so let’s see how Tabitha got on with the basket we sent her.

While the weather is definitely not living up to the idea of “summer” and I have spent a good few days glaring at the sky (it’s making no difference), perhaps it will all turn around and we’ll actually be warm and toasty at some point this year and then this deal will be awesome. Aldi is selling this ice cream maker for only £19.99, a great deal for lots of lovely homemade ice cream.

• Click here to get ice cream with Aldi

The Aldi ice cream maker has a 1.4 litre capacity and can produce approximately one litre of ice cream at a time. There is not a lot of information about what ingredients are needed so I can’t tell you if this works out cheaper than shop bought, but I am sure it will taste far better than a cheap ice cream tub.

It will take you about 40 minutes to make the ice cream and the tub comes with a reversible built-in thermostat. The paddle turns both left and right and the ice cream will keep for up to a week before losing flavour and texture.

Thanks to Loopijuice at HUKD!

At this time of the year all the supermarket's put together their own special Christmas sections, with special offers and deals to entice us to spend our cash with them. The cheaper supermarkets are no different, which made us wonder here at PlayPennies. Are Christmas treats from a lower priced supermarket still really treats?

There was only one way to find out, and Aldi were kind enough to allow us a sample of their special Christmas range. Unfortunately, in the interests of impartiality, we the writers at PlayPennies aren't allowed to test the products we receive too. Instead we have a panel of PlayPennies parents who do the hard work (sigh) and try them out for us.

This week it was the turn of PlayPennies mum of three Samantha to try out some Christmas goodies from Aldi.

Samantha received a big brown box from Aldi with traditional tasty Christmas things inside:

• Specially Selected Christmas Pudding - £2.99
• Deep-filled mince pies - 89p for six
• A chocolate Reindeer (think the Lindt Chocolate bunny but loosely reindeer shaped) -  99p
• And a bottle of Champagne! Vueve Monsigny - £9.99 75cl

Her initial rection was mixed. "The champagne and reindeer were good for me...but I can't stand Christmas Pudding or mince pies (although I adore the smell of them), so reviewing these Aldi Christmas goodies became a bit of a family affair!"

Her son loves mince pies so it was over to him for those and he diligently made notes about his first visual and taste impressions.

"Nice and sparkly with the sugar on the domed tops of the mince pies - they look lovely." He was a bit disappointed when he discovered they weren't jam-packed to the pastry with filling and deep-filled seemed to be something of an understatement. But he said they tasted nice, the pastry wasn't dry and they were not too crumbly but crumbly enough. There were six of them in the box and they disappeared pretty quickly.

"How fast food gets devoured in this house is a pretty good barometer of whether or not something's any good!"

The chocolate reindeer was a big hit with everyone. It comes wrapped in gold foil with a little velvet ribbon collar round his neck, with a little tag on it (very Lindt).  Samantha's youngest son, five year old Kye, got to eat most of this. "He can be quite fussy when it comes to chocolate, but it got his seal of approval."

Samantha did make him share though. "We all tried a piece and I must confess it was VERY nice, my daughter actually asked whether it WAS a Lindt Chocolate Reindeer - high praise indeed."

Samantha faced a bit of a dilemma when it came to testing the Christmas Pudding. "I have no idea what makes a good Crimbo pudding or not! I wouldn't be able to tell you if one tasted better than another one as they are all hideous as far as I'm concerned - it's the bits of orange and lemon peel in them that i really can't stand. The rest of everything sounds YUM!"

Is she mad?! I mean, we're talking Christmas Pudding here. CHRISTMAS PUDDING! This is quite simply the food of gods. How anyone can call it hideous is utterly beyond me!

Still, Samantha gamely soldiered on. "So I thought I'd better try this one - I mean, what IF this was the Christmas pudding for me!! If I didn't try it, I could be missing out!! I didn't like it." Oh dear.

No one else in her family likes Christmas pudding either but, as luck would have it, Samantha had a  friend staying for the weekend who would, in their own words, live on Christmas pudding if they could.

However, it didn't produce the hoped for joy and rapture. "Apparently, it was 'ok, but not great' - a bit dry and just lacked that certain 'something' - I was next to useless in helping to identify what the certain something was. It wasn't horrible...it just wasn't the best Christmas pudding in the world. It did have lots of nuts in it though, and that's good...so I'm told."

Now the champagne was a bit more to Samantha's liking. I have to say I was jealous here, as Veuve is my favourite brand of champers. "The champagne I CAN tell you about - how can I say this without sounding like a total snob? It was good for such a cheap bottle (£9.99). It was either going to be passable and perfectly drinkable or it was going to be hideous - hurrah that it was the former."

It was so acceptable in fact that it disappeared almost as quickly as the mince pies - Samantha thought it was dry, but not so dry that it sucked every bit of moisture out of your mouth! It was light, and went down rather too easily. "We didn't need to put it back in the fridge for the following evening" she confessed.

Overall she thought that if you're looking for something that has the actual word 'Champagne' on it, but don't want to/can't spend upwards of £30 or £40 pounds a bottle, then this really isn't too bad as a cheap alternative.

And Finally

From a family obsessed by Lindt, their praise of the reindeer is high praise indeed! That definitely was a winner. And the champagne also seems like quite a good bargain. While the Christmas pudding and the mince pies didn't get as much praise, they certainly weren't bad either. It does go to show that you can still stuff yourself silly at Christmas on a small budget!

The lovely folks over at ALDI sent us a big box full of spooky Halloween chocolate goodies to review.

But with just five and a bit weeks left until the PlayPennies Christmas party, and little black dresses to fit into, we're all busy trying NOT to eat chocolate!

So with relief, and heavy hearts because everything looked scrummy, we sent the box of ALDI Halloween treats on to our reviewer Sam for her and her family to enjoy - what a tough job they all had *grin*

Halloween is becoming increasingly popular every year and with more and more kids ghost and ghouls, witches and warlocks knocking on your door it can be an expensive business.

You need to send your own kids out to collect Halloween cash just to cover your chocolate overheads!

"We carve a pumpkin, light the candle inside and set it outside the front door every year to let the kids know we are open for Halloween business," explains Sam, "before long there is a steady steady stream of Halloweeners knocking on the door."

We sent Sam the following selection of Halloween goodies from ALDI:

• A bag of scary chocolate pumpkins - 79p
• A bag of scary chocolate ghosts - 79p
• A bag of spooky lollipops - £1.49
• A bag of spooky marshmallows - 99p
• A bag of Halloweenies (a bit like Halloween smarties) - 79p
• Two bags of creepy chocolate shapes (spiders in Sam's case) - 89p

"There was such a lot in the box when we opened it, it almost felt like Christmas instead of Halloween," enthused Sam.  "I was utterly gobsmacked to discover that it all came to less than £6!"

When we saw all the ALDI Halloween goodies in the box, we thought the same too.

We were also rather pleased to note that the label notices declaring there was nothing 'nasty' in any of the items - no artificial colours, flavours or other horror suspects we should be looking out for; hurrah!

"My kids were particularly thrilled with the solid milk chocolate 'Creepy Spiders'" reveals Sam, "they loved the patterned tin foil wrapper and the cardboard legs."

All of the chocolate is milk chocolate and Sam tells us that it's very lovely milk chocolate, and not naff like some cheap milk chocolate can be - we weren't really jealous at this point *sigh*

"The spooky marshmallows were lovely too," says Sam, "but for some reason my youngest didn't like the orange ones, only the white ones. He said they tasted different , but I couldn't taste any difference at all...and let me assure you I conducted a thorough test!"

We were very impressed with the quality of the wrappers of all the Halloween treats that ALDI sent us - they were bright and colourful, unmistakeably spooky and Halloweenesque and unbelievable value for money.

There must have been between 20 and 30 individual little scary chocolate pumpkins and ghosts in each bag, at least 10 creepy chocolate spiders and 10, or more, spooky lollipops.

"Now, about the lollipops..." continued Sam, "we're really sorry but we won't be able to give an opinion on those."

Now this was something we hadn't expected! Everyone loves lollipops; we wondered if perhaps we'd forgotten to put them back in the box, but there was no sign of them lurking anywhere in the PlayPennies office.

"We can tell you however, that they must have been very tasty as our dog ate them all and left us just with the bottom of each wrapper still attached to the stick!" Sam revealed!

We're very pleased to be able to report that eating 10 ALDI spooky lollipops had no adverse affects on Sams' dog whatsoever...must be because there's 'NO NASTY STUFF' in them!

And Finally...

Sam was very impressed with the quality, quantity and value for money of all the Halloween treats from ALDI.

"Everything is absolutely ideal for having by the door to put into Halloween buckets, a little bit of money will go a very long way and keep a lot of Halloween hunters very happy.

I'll definitely be going to ALDI to stock up on some more in time for Halloween night and won't have to worry about breaking the bank!"

All of these things are ideal too, if you're throwing a Halloween party too - a few bags and a few bowls of treats and you'll be well away.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

I hate diets. I love food. I especially love warm and toasty doughnuts made fresh with sprinkles of cinnamon. Ooooh. So imagine my joy when I uncovered this lovely deal from Aldi – only £9.99 for a mini doughnut maker!

• Click here to munch on over to Aldi

This happy little guy makes half a dozen mini doughnuts in two to four minutes. Heck, this thing is lethal. If it can spit out six doughnuts in five minutes then how on earth am I going to stick to my diet. Aaargh!

The doughnut maker has non-stick coated cooking plates and anti-slip feet and comes with a silver finish, which should suit most kitchens. They don’t say how big it is, which is a bit annoying because sometimes you’re already wrestling space issues and it would be nice to have some idea as to whether it would fit.

Who cares! Bring on the yummy, scrummy doughnuts. Let’s eat them together while watching good movies and ignoring the scales shouting warnings from the bathroom.

Thanks to huggychair at HUKD!

You read that correctly, dear PlayPennies fan, Aldi have a range of products for Mums this Mother’s Day and they’re all coming in at bargain prices. We challenged them to create gorgeous Mother's Day bundle for under £15 so we could see if they were not only well priced, but also well worth it.

The hamper we received had the Anti-ageing hand cream, anti-ageing body butter and a ladies pyjama set and here are the results...

Lacura Naturals Premium Anti-Ageing Hand Cream

This cream doesn’t have a powerful smell, in fact it is barely there at all. All the mums approved of this fact.

“It doesn’t clash with my perfume or leave a lingering trace on my skin,” said Emma, “I love the fact that it just sinks into my skin and leaves nothing but softness behind.”

The cream is light and there is absolutely no stickiness or residue left on your skin once it’s been absorbed. It also doesn’t take very long to massage into your skin so it’s perfect for really busy mums that want that extra bit of moisture but need to carry on typing, tidying and so forth.

“It leaves your hands soft and feeling moisturised without being left slippery and slimy,” said Sarah.

The cream has lotus flower extract that strengthens, supports and improves the appearance of the skin.

The hand cream sells for a mere £2.99, you only need a driblet every time your hands feel dry and it works a charm. A bargain basement price for a good quality product.

Lacura Naturals Premium Anti-Ageing Body Butter

I am one of the first to look dubiously at anti-ageing body creams and butters. If they don’t have a tangy, medicinal smell then they leave me feeling extremely gooey. The Lacura Naturals range isn’t entirely devoid of these issues, but it is really lovely to use.

“I must confess that the packaging doesn’t look very ‘premium’ at all,” said Sarah, “It doesn’t smell premium either. In fact, it doesn’t smell of anything at all.”

While Sarah didn’t notice much of a scent, hat I did sniff out a bit of a medicinal whiff when I first applied the cream. However, this was instantly gone once the cream was rubbed onto my skin and I was quite impressed.

“I believe the lack of smell is a good thing,” said Sarah, “There’s nothing worse than creams with an overpowering smell and this one won’t clash with whatever perfume you decide to wear.”

It seems all ladies have this concern then...

The cream itself is light and frothy, there is no residue, no stickiness and absolutely no gooey feeling after you’re done. I adored it and will probably keep on using this product from now on.

“When I hear the words body butter I think ‘heavy’ cream that leaves you greasy and shiny for hours,” said Sarah, “This does neither of those things! It’s thick enough to do what it’s supposed to but doesn’t leave me feeling like I’ve suffocated my skin. I like it!”

The Lacuna body butter has Kukui Nit for protection and Bambus from bamboo for strength.

Coming in at £4.99, this cream sits in about the same price league as most body butters but it has a certain something that makes it really well worth a try.

Ladies Pyjama Set

So mum has now got her hand cream and her body butter so why not net her a set of super comfy pyjamas to lounge around in after she’s pampered herself? The set comes gift packaged already (bonus!) and are made from satin.

You get a cotton vest with a satin binding around the top edge and the mums got their sets in either pink or lilac. The pants are completely satin and unbelievably silky on the skin.

“They felt wonderfully luxurious to lounge around in and were incredibly comfortable too,” said Sarah, “Lots of room to move without looking like clown trousers.”

Personally I have to agree with Sarah. These pjs are so comfy that you honestly do not want to get out of them. If I didn’t have a preschooler who would grow up thinking that wearing your sleepwear all day was normal, I would, well, wear these all day. Yum

They cost (wait for it) only £5.99 making them a fantastic bargain set that looks and feels great.

The other products that you could use to mix and match your Mother’s Day gift box include a silk scarf for £3.99, day and night creams at £4.99 each and a gift plant box that comes in a hat box style package for only £2.99.

And Finally

You can magic up a really nice gift box for mum with this range of products from Aldi and it will both look and feel expensive, when you’ve only spent £15! I heartily recommend this for anyone that would like to create something special but is working with a limited budget.