OPINION: As the festive season comes to an end, I reviewed Meghan Markle’s favourite recipes from With Love, Meghan.

Meghan Markle’s Netflix series With Love, Meghan returned for a festive special (Image: Netflix)

Meghan Markle’s glossy Netflix show has made a festive comeback just in time for the celebratory period. The Duchess of Sussex brought the cameras back to her rented California home, where she shared some of her favourite hosting tips and tricks ahead of the Christmas celebrations alongside a host of celebrity pals. In the hour-long special, With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration, the mum-of-two donned her khaki apron and hands full of jewels as she got stuck into sharing some of her favourite family recipes.

After watching the TV special, I decided to try out some of her crowd-pleasing dishes to see if they’re really worth investing time and money into to wow my family and friends this year. And I can honestly say, it’s not worth the hassle.

She became famous for her Rainbow Fruit Platter in the first series (Image: Netflix)

To give a fair judgment, I decided to try one of her signature dishes, the Rainbow Fruit Platter, as well as one of her festive treats, Reindeer Chow. The series one dish was just as simple as it sounded: arranging chopped fruits in a rainbow order on a chopping board.

For her whopping fruit plate, she appeared to use a wide range of fruits that were enough to feed an army. For the recipe, she chopped three punnets of strawberries, two punnets of raspberries, a punnet of blueberries, three kiwis, a pineapple, four satsumas, three nectarines, a banana, and, of course, her famous dried rose petal sprinkles.

Her staggering fruit platter would set the average person back a gut-wrenching £34, on, let’s face it, a bunch of fresh fruit that hardly anyone is going to eat at a party.

Not only that, but the fruit also oxidises very quickly, meaning no one wants to enjoy the platter after it’s been left out of the fridge for 10 minutes. Because of this, I decided to recreate the dish on a much more scaled-back budget, costing just £10 for the lot.

I recreated her Rainbow Fruit Platter and Reindeer Chow (Image: Express)

It isn’t a difficult dish to make and looks very visually striking, so I decided to take it to a birthday party for my friend’s son’s first birthday. Despite the playful nature of the design and the cocktail sticks on offer, hardly anyone picked at the fruit platter, leaving me no choice but to transform it into a smoothie.

Meanwhile, the Reindeer Chow went down like a house on fire – but it wasn’t nearly as easy to make. The American staple is a festive take on the traditional Puppy Chow, which is basically just rocky road covered in icing sugar.

The dish itself was easy to make, simply melt the chocolate and peanut butter in a microwave and mix with your favourite snacks. She used cereal and nuts, while I opted for popcorn and pretzels.

But my biggest bugbear with the dish was the overwhelming amount of icing sugar used. In the recipe, the Duchess recommends using two cups of icing sugar, but in the festive episode, she empties an entire jar of icing sugar into the bowl.

She made some Reindeer Chow in her festive special (Image: Netflix )

And as soon as I got stuck in, I realised why she used so much! I ended up using at least one-third of a box of icing sugar in the dish to break up the mix into bite-sized pieces, making a mess all over the kitchen table.

Personally, I don’t think the dish needed all that extra sugar. With the mix being so similar to rocky road, I think it would have been a lot tastier without all the extra sugar, allowing the other flavours to shine through rather than smothering them with all that sugar.

Saying that, the dish went down beautifully at the birthday party and was quite a hit with the guests. This tasty dish only set me back just £6 in total, making it a much cheaper alternative to the fruit platter, but what it lacks in cost it makes up for in calories.

Overall, I think these dishes are easy to make, but an unnecessary faff to make, especially if you’re a mum with little ones running around. There are many more cost-effective ways to entertain that look just as visually pleasing without breaking the bank, so save your money, especially during the holidays.