And my 8 year old granddaughter seems to know the difference from good and great! She had been eating a brand name chocolate bar when she saw the beautifully wrapped Godiva chocolates and asked for one. I bought one, but insisted she take a drink of water to clear her palate from the other chocolate before tasting the Godiva.
With her first small bite, her eyes lit up and she smiled. "This is really good!" I agreed and said there were lots of different chocolates some better than others and I was glad she could tell the difference. But know she always wants to "gold chocolates" when I visit!
Each day when I go to the post office to get my mail, there in the box along with the mail is a Dove chocolate piece courtesy of our postmaster! It's a particularly nice surprise when the box is full of bills! Rolling the piece of dark chocolate in my mouth as I toss the junk mail into the wastebasket right there at the post office...ummm! And when I've been out of town or unable to pick up my mail for a few days....those pieces of chocolate are something to look forward to!
I took a Royal Caribbean cruise with some friends a little over a year ago and one of the stops was at a small island where I was able to take a crazy taxi up into the hills to see the remarkable waterfall! As waterfalls go, it didn't compare to Niagara Falls, but for a small Caribbean island it was lovely. And the ice cold pineapple drink served from a wooden hut was just the ticket on a hot day after the climb up to the falls.
But while we were walking up to the falls through the jungle, my young guide picked up a brown pod and took out some slimy white seeds. She told me these were cocao beans which, when dried and baked make chocolate. You'd never have known it from the seeds!
Quoting from a monograph from the Culinary Boot Camp of the CIA in Hyde Park, NY, the bean is spelled cacao before it is roasted and processed and cocoa afterward. It's a long process before that piece of white slime turns into "the food of the gods".
Again, referring to the monograph, there are many types of chocolate products which each have their own uses and tastes. Cocoa powder results from almost all of the cocoa butter being pressed out of the cocoa mass. Cocoa butter is the fat which is extruded from the pressed block cocoa; couverture consists of cocoa mass, sugar and cocoa butter; milk chocolate which is cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter and at least 14% milk solids; white chocolate consisting of cocoa butter sugar and milk solids; and Baker's chocolate which is pretty bitter.
At the Iron Mountain Inn B&B we use the powder to make rich hot chocolate to go with the brownies topped with fudge. Each of our rooms has a small dish holding various types of snacks from Hershey's kisses to chocolate mints. But most of our guests enjoy the chocolate chip cookies from the bottomless cookie jar. These are made with white chocolate chips, dark chips or milk chocolate chips. And when we can find them, the coconut M&M's. We have to make certain the ingredients for these cookies are always on hand as guests do seem to like them!
We also make chocolate covered strawberries for special guests and they are always on the breakfast table for Valentine's week, in fact for the entire month of February which we call "Lover's Month".
Now it's time to go and make the cookies - they all seem to have disappeared!
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