Chocolate 101: The Trappings of an Addiction

I sat myself down intending to write about one of the dozens of things I've made since school started: kimchi, Burmese eggplant stew, elk and yak short ribs, saffron cookies, a menagerie of canned fruits and vegetables. But the photographs of what I made this weekend overpowered me. I'll get to the rest eventually, maybe when I'm locked in a room with no distractions and my hands tied to the keyboard, well out of reach of the cookie jar.

This Sunday, with no desire to work on my thesis, read Euripidean fiction, or do much of anything else, I decided to make chocolate.

Ever wonder what goes into a bar? Something like this:



Perhaps there is no cat. But there could be cat hair, if your monsters like to beg to be petted mid-experiment.

That's what this is: an experiment. I have never made chocolate from scratch before, and all of the recipes on the internet come from raw food blogs and advocate the use of raw cocoa powder, coconut oil, and whatever exotic berry is being appropriated from developing nations nowadays. The irony of these recipes is that 'cacao butter' is still a highly processed food, only it's been highly processed at a marginally lower temperature. I bite my thumb at thee, raw foodists.

But since that's all I had to go for, I appropriated the ratio and then went wild. I happened to have lavender honey lying around from the summer, so I used that, along with lavender blossoms nicked from my neighbor's yard and Hawaiian red salt. The flavor combination is a nod to a brand of chocolate bars my mother sent me many moons ago, called Antidote. She likes it because it is made by an Austrian woman and is frequently on sale; I like it because each flavor is named after a crazy goddess, like Kakia: Wicked Greek Goddess of Vice. If I ever need an alias, I'm going with that one.

These chocolates, my very first, are halfway between bar and ganache, since I used super fatty European butter in addition to cocoa butter, and neglected to temper. Surprisingly, they're still solid at room temperature, but since the melting point of cocoa butter is just below body temperature--hence why I enjoy chocolate by letting it melt on my tongue for a moment first--they start to soften as soon as you pick them up. Which is only appropriate, since they are telling you to eat them.

And if you want to eat them, and you happen to live in Portland, you can buy them at the Old Shoppe of the Paradox Café! I'll be bringing in new flavors regularly and restocking the stash of chocolates, along with rotating flavors of biscotti.