GEEKERY  
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20090420

chocolate festival!

This past Wednesday (Tax Day), there was a chocolate festival at work. Twelve local chocolatiers/vendors came and gave samples and sold their goods. Needless to say, I went home with a lighter wallet and a fuller belly. And some newly generated opinions.
Alegio Chocolates: very pretty truffles, but expensive
Barlovento Chocolates: equally pretty truffles, half the price, amazing flavors. Theirs is the chocolate pictured.
Charles Chocolates: pretty, tasty, and have a good variety of products
Chocolatier Blue, Edible Love Chocolates, Lyla's Chocolates: I don't have any recollections, but they might have been some of the overcrowded booths.
Go To Chocolates: A very distinct aesthetic: twine, maps, etc. I bought a bit of fudge syrup from them, thick and dark. I now need some Häagen-Dazs.
Recchiuti Confections: Another pretty. My only other particular memory was of their chocolate covered hazelnuts. Yum.
San Francisco Chocolate Factory: The most commercial of the vendors, selling lots of different types and brands.
Shokolaat: The names for their flavors are a little obscure, so I was more hesitant than I would have liked. I only tried one of theirs, the London Fog Lifter, and it was incredible. I'm now a fan of salted chocolate.
Tcho: The deal with these guys is that they don't add anything to their chocolate for flavor, they just select the beans and tailor the process to be "nutty" or "fruity." The result is good, but subtle flavors.
The Xocolate Bar: I encountered these guys near one of my favorite bookstores, long before the festival. They do lots of zany chocolate sculptures. Their smaller chocolates are very tasty as is their gelato.

1 comment:

JBB said...

After reading this chocolate love fest, I came across the following in the BYU alumni magazine. It is amanochoclate.com which is the culmination of two zoobies Art Pollard '96 and David Goble '96 quest to find the world's finest cocoa beans to process in their Orem chocolate factory. They were software engineers who designed some equipment for the physics department. The company is Amano Artisan Chocolate which means "by hand" and "they love" in Italian. They found the beans in the southwest coast of Madagascar and the Ocumare Valley in Venezuela.