Tagged: chocolate

All candy should come with technical cross-section diagrams

While snagging a fresh Mozart Kugel from the snack table at the office I noticed this informative diagram inside the box. Behold the majesty of two different kinds of marzipan on one chocolate ball.  What really drove the Salieri Kugel to madness was how easy the Mozart Kugel made it look.

Inside the Mozart Kugel

Now that’s my kind of infographic. It’s too bad you typically only get this sort of diagram with German or Japanese candy. To my mind, it should be as required as the nutrition information or the candy guide for the perplexed. Via Steve Almond’s CandyFreak, you can also test your ability to identify candy bars by their cross sections, and there’s a whole load of cross-sectional chocolate fun at Edible Cartography. It should go without saying that I really like that name.

The Legend of the Passover Hamster

You know how every office has somebody that loves to tell stories, often the same ones again and agin?  I’m not gonna lie, it can be annoying, except when you get a really good story out of it.  This is one such story: The Legend of the Passover Hamster.

It should be no surprise to anybody who has grown up a member of a minority that the media and culture is soaked with the images and traditions of the majority group, and that this can give the minority a weird envy for the cultural trappings of the majority.  It is out of this cultural soup that the Passover hamster emerges every year to, well, I’m not really sure what, if anything, the Passover hamster does.  I hope it’s not that creepy breaking & entering you get with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

The Passover Hamster, to be simple and direct about it, is a chocolate Easter bunny with the ears removed.  And by “removed” I mean eaten by the Jewish parent preparing (creating? constructing?) the Passover hamster for a credulous child with a bad case of Christian holiday envy.  No, there are no hamsters in the old testament, except perhaps to note that they are not kosher.  But hey, are there any chocolate-egg-laying bunnies in the new testament?

There’s something about this story that delights me, and that’s odd since I have such scorn for the Hanukkah bush.  To me the Hanukkah bush is just straight up envy of another tradition.  It accepts lesser stature (bush vs tree) as if it’s ashamed of something.   The Passover hamster is satirical, even slightly transgressive, like a golem in drag at a Purim spiel.  Plus, in years where Passover comes after Easter, you can get the bunnies at a good discount.

Here, for the perplexed, is a brief guide to creating not the classic Passover hamster of our youth, but a modern version with a twist.  I illustrate with peanut butter, but of course that’s not kosher for passover so I’ll have to eat this hamster before sundown.  I think I can manage it.

1. Procure hollow chocolate Bunny and filling

Traditional eastern european fillings include prune and poppy seed, but you can also use more middle eastern fillings such as organic almond butter or tahini.   Chill the bunny and let the filling sit at room temperature.

2. Remove the ears

Strictly speaking, this should be done in a single swift stroke with a sharp knife by a man with no stain upon him.  Or you could just chew them off.  If you need more explicit directions, I can send you an e-mohel.

3. Fill your hamster

Depending on the configuration of your particular bunny, you can either just spoon in the filling, or you may have to use a pastry bag.

4. Let set, and serve

This little guy kinda looks like Bart Simpson, doesn’t he?  Happy holidays.

* The observant – and the Observant – will note that it’s pretty unlikely that a chocolate Easter bunny would be kosher for passover, or even kosher at all.  I would instruct such persons to carve their Passover hamsters from solid blocks of passover chocolate, or perhaps build them with laser-cut sheets of chocolate-covered matzo.

Caffeine Nation

Last week I attended a discussion and book signing for Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America by historian Benjamin Carp.  History might not run as deep here in Massachusetts as it does in Sicily, but it’s pretty thick in Boston and the event was held at the Old South Meeting House, a site of major interest to the topic of the 1773 Tea Party.

I will not attempt to summarize the book, largely since I have not read it, but I do have to highlight something Carp mentioned in his talk: tea, coffee, and chocolate – all hot, bitter, caffeinated beverages – all hit the European scene around the same time (the 1580s) and some say they they fueled the enlightenment in Europe and then the revolution in America.

That’s a big claim, but I’m not one to underestimate the power of coffee, tea and chocolate.  Europeans gradually figured out that they liked their chocolate, coffee and tea with both milk and sugar, the latter another product of the transoceanic trade that somehow made these goods widely if not cheaply available hundreds of years before GPS.

The colonists dressed as Indians who dumped tons of tea into the harbor in 1773 had autonomy and self-determination on their minds more than a particular choice of beverage, but it would be as interesting to hear their take on 21st century Americans arguing about patronage of small independent coffee shops or multinational megacoffeechains as it would to know what they think of today’s tea party movement.

Look to the peanut butter oatmeal cookie

I’ve been informed that today, June 12, is National Peanut Butter Cookie Day.  What better day to test my crackpot theory that you can improve things by adding peanut butter.  For example, here is Quaker Oats’ “Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookie” recipe, and my modifications in [brackets].

  • Preheat overn to 350F
  • Combine and cream
    • 1/2 pound (2 sticks) margarine or butter [avoid margarine at all costs; substitute peanut butter for half the butter]
    • 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar [if your brown sugar has turned into a rock, gently microwave it into molasses]
    • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • Add and beat in
    • 2 eggs
    • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • Add
    • 1+1/2 cups flour
    • 1 teaspoon baking soda
    • 1 teaspoon cinnamon [I've never bothered with this, although I have been known to add some ground coffee]
    • 1/2 teaspoon salt (optional) [salt is never optional]
  • Stir in
    • 3 cupts oats
    • 1 cup raisins [feh, I use chocolate chips or more likely a hacked up chocolate bar or Reese's pieces for special occasions]
  • Drop by rounded tablespoons onto cookie sheets [use a larger spoon or just scoop chunks with your hands if you get bored]
  • Bake 10-12 mins

Viola!  Chocolate chunk peanut butter oatmeal cookies.

Tour de Taza

When you live outside the tropics, it’s sort of hard to buy “local chocolate.”  You can buy from a local chocolatier, which is somebody who buys chocolate from someplace else and melts, molds, rolls, carves and otherwise remakes it into delicious confections.  You can also buy chocolate from a local chocolate maker, somebody who imports cocoa beans and turns them into what we know as chocolate.  Somerville’s Taza Chocolate is in the latter category, and this weekend, they opened their doors for an open house and tour.

Welcome to the Taza Chocolate Factory Tour

Health codes prevented the hundreds of tour-goers from entering most of the factory, but we did get a good look at the roaster and winnower with co-founder Larry.  The aroma was intoxicating.

Larry and the roaster

Looking vaguely Steve Jobslike, Larry held forth passionately about Taza’s commitment to their cocoa cooperative in the Dominican Republic, local partnerships in Somerville (they buy letterpress labels from nearby Albertine Press!), and creating an organic product using ancient Mexican stone mills.  The company is just three years old, but the major equipment was purchased used and is over 30 years old.

The winnower.

Is that a cork substituting for a button on the winnowing machine?  No matter. One business-minded guest asked where the bottleneck was in the process, and it turns out that the answer to that is wrapping and packaging, and Taza plans to expand into adjacent space in the building to increase capacity.

Indulging my usual passion for salty chocolate, I picked up a $4 round of Taza’s Stone Ground Organic Chocolate Mexicano in the salted almond variety.  The factory might not open to the public again for a while, but run don’t walk to Taza’s website or your local supplier.