I love chocolate
I love it so much, I'd like to grow a chocolate plant! Thinkgeek has a chocolate kit for sale, including raw cacao beans. I wonder if they'd grow? I can get some groovy lights these days, so giving it the light needed isn't seriously hard to do. Imagine a chocolate plant in saskatchewan? LOL!
So I made a shitload of tasty chocolate treats. I made white chocolate coated macadamia nuts, pumpkin pacman loaf (pity I didn't include the cute names), classic marzipan, paleo nanaimo bars, pistachio bark, chocolate marzipan spirals, walnut truffle balls, raspberry creams, and some white chocolate macaroons that didn't make it into the packages due to being poorly manufactured the first time around. It's too bad but in fact the packages are well and nicely stocked anyway. I took an assorted nuts gift tray I'd saved and filled that with choclates for the vet clinic. It's lovely, with cling wrap, christmas ribbon and a nice card. The tray is wicker with plastic insert that has divisions, and the card includes an ingredient list. I included some date rolls from the bulk store too. They look good and make a nice alternative to the chocolate and marzipan that makes up pretty much all the other stuff.
I wish I could have given it directly to Vivienne but it's for the clinic staff altogether and I am quite sure Vivienne will contact me by some means with kind words. I always worry when I do something like this, a pricey gift that took a lot of work, that nobody will like it and my effort and expense gone to waste. I felt like that when I did a gift box for Rhoda and she left voice mail telling me I need to put in more sugar and butter and milk to make my chocolates good.
That's the point, you moron, it hasn't got those things in it. If I put in tons of honey it's gooey and so I only put in as much as it takes to make it edible, and a bit more. The less, the better, but take the edge off. Once you've eaten some good chocolate a few times your taste for it overrides even regular candy bars. One comes to understand why they're labled as candy and use quotes for the word chocolate, or add a letter y to the end. Real chocolate isn't candy, and it isn't a cheat in anyone's diet. It's like eating vitamin pills, it's so supercharged with vitality. Cacao iss truly the food of the gods but needs sweetening. Honey is another one of these miracle foods, so putting it together with the chocolate again makes sense and it's still food, real food.
To this basic goodness I add only nuts or dried fruit. I didn't use dried fruit this time. I love the taste of apricot and chocolate but do not love chopping the sticky stuff enough. I suppose if I had a good foood processor I could pour the chocolate in on the chopped fruit. I only have one small one that's too cheap to really use.
Today I started to realize, the level of creativity in my treats actually is above the norm and most folks, busy at work and not a lot of time to be experimental cooks, wouldn't be able to do it without recipes. I really ought to put a recipe book together, come to think of it. I could sell it, probably. Chocolates that skirt round everyone's diet would sure be popular! I mean, it's food, not cheating, so aside from calorie counters it's not a cheat to eat this. it's too expensive to gorge on too, and in fact, too nourishing to want to. It takes very little to feel sated, and I don't mean that sort of sickly state of fuzzy that sugar and butter cause. I mean actually sated, fed, content. My stuff does that.
I really need to find a source of beeswax. My apiarist friend only operates a single hive and he keeps the bees as pets so he doesn't take away their wax generally. Then there's this guy on the tv, part of a science thing or something, and he's making big candles out of it.
Thing is, to sell it as food, they'd have to follow better sanitation procedures than for candles. They may not be able to certify the wax edible because of handling methods. The best way to find what I need would be to get my paws on edible honey comb which would have been harvested with a view too ingestion.
I really should turn up at the farmer's market.
Mmm, chocolate. Yeah, I should work up recipes.
So I made a shitload of tasty chocolate treats. I made white chocolate coated macadamia nuts, pumpkin pacman loaf (pity I didn't include the cute names), classic marzipan, paleo nanaimo bars, pistachio bark, chocolate marzipan spirals, walnut truffle balls, raspberry creams, and some white chocolate macaroons that didn't make it into the packages due to being poorly manufactured the first time around. It's too bad but in fact the packages are well and nicely stocked anyway. I took an assorted nuts gift tray I'd saved and filled that with choclates for the vet clinic. It's lovely, with cling wrap, christmas ribbon and a nice card. The tray is wicker with plastic insert that has divisions, and the card includes an ingredient list. I included some date rolls from the bulk store too. They look good and make a nice alternative to the chocolate and marzipan that makes up pretty much all the other stuff.
I wish I could have given it directly to Vivienne but it's for the clinic staff altogether and I am quite sure Vivienne will contact me by some means with kind words. I always worry when I do something like this, a pricey gift that took a lot of work, that nobody will like it and my effort and expense gone to waste. I felt like that when I did a gift box for Rhoda and she left voice mail telling me I need to put in more sugar and butter and milk to make my chocolates good.
That's the point, you moron, it hasn't got those things in it. If I put in tons of honey it's gooey and so I only put in as much as it takes to make it edible, and a bit more. The less, the better, but take the edge off. Once you've eaten some good chocolate a few times your taste for it overrides even regular candy bars. One comes to understand why they're labled as candy and use quotes for the word chocolate, or add a letter y to the end. Real chocolate isn't candy, and it isn't a cheat in anyone's diet. It's like eating vitamin pills, it's so supercharged with vitality. Cacao iss truly the food of the gods but needs sweetening. Honey is another one of these miracle foods, so putting it together with the chocolate again makes sense and it's still food, real food.
To this basic goodness I add only nuts or dried fruit. I didn't use dried fruit this time. I love the taste of apricot and chocolate but do not love chopping the sticky stuff enough. I suppose if I had a good foood processor I could pour the chocolate in on the chopped fruit. I only have one small one that's too cheap to really use.
Today I started to realize, the level of creativity in my treats actually is above the norm and most folks, busy at work and not a lot of time to be experimental cooks, wouldn't be able to do it without recipes. I really ought to put a recipe book together, come to think of it. I could sell it, probably. Chocolates that skirt round everyone's diet would sure be popular! I mean, it's food, not cheating, so aside from calorie counters it's not a cheat to eat this. it's too expensive to gorge on too, and in fact, too nourishing to want to. It takes very little to feel sated, and I don't mean that sort of sickly state of fuzzy that sugar and butter cause. I mean actually sated, fed, content. My stuff does that.
I really need to find a source of beeswax. My apiarist friend only operates a single hive and he keeps the bees as pets so he doesn't take away their wax generally. Then there's this guy on the tv, part of a science thing or something, and he's making big candles out of it.
Thing is, to sell it as food, they'd have to follow better sanitation procedures than for candles. They may not be able to certify the wax edible because of handling methods. The best way to find what I need would be to get my paws on edible honey comb which would have been harvested with a view too ingestion.
I really should turn up at the farmer's market.
Mmm, chocolate. Yeah, I should work up recipes.