Alternate Title: Decorating Homes with Genuine Chocolate Flakes is a Thing…Right?

My apologies for the long radio silence.  Apparently I’ve allowed taking pictures of chocolate and eating chocolate to interfere with writing about chocolate.  (In my defense, how am I going to have anything to write about if I don’t get to play with it?)  The pictures I’ve taken are available on Instagram or right here in the photo gallery.  Thanks to the recent rains, there were fresh flowers available to help decorate some shots.  I thought flowers looked lovely with the stunning (and very tasty) Marou Lam Dong 74% chocolate from Vietnam.

Today, I’m mainly here to tell you about how much I got teased for the dedication to my art.
(Those are my words. If you would have asked the bystanders, they would have said I got teased because I made a mess.)

Scene: The Kitchen
Time: 10:00am – 12:00pm some weekends ago
Main Cast: Me (Because I was the only one making the mess doing all the work.)
Supporting Cast:  My mom and my siblings (Because they were doing all the wisecracking.)

Ever try chopping over two pounds of chocolate with a knife that wouldn’t be your first choice? Under the circumstances, I think it ought to be perfectly understandable that a few little slivers would stray, but apparently I use the terms “few”, “little”, and “stray” with too much looseness. Merrily I went along, chopping and melting.  The chocolate.  (Actually I might have melted a little too.  July and the tropics and an improvised double boiler will do that to you.)

Nevermind what I used the chocolate FOR.  It was a failed experiment.  Only I will say that I was quite amused by the fact that improvised molds made by spooning chocolate into plastic inserts (that used to hold store-bought chocolates) worked great.  On the other hand, my attempt at getting fancy by making ganache-filled chocolates in my nice-and-proper silicon mold?  A total flop. (Well, at least I thought so.  I decide to share them with the neighbors anyway and somebody got with me later and asked if they could pay me to…and I quote…”make more flops”!)

The chocolate experiment ran close to 12pm, which is when everyone started coming out of the woodwork (ie. other parts of the house) because they were hungry.  This is also when eyebrows started to be raised and I started hearing things like:

“There is chocolate everywhere!”
“You have chocolate all OVER you!”
“I could sit down in a mud puddle and look cleaner than you are right now!”  (Brothers.  Gotta love ’em.)
“I can’t tell if those brown spots on your arm are freckles or chocolate.”

At this point it was getting funny, so I went over to the computer to start typing it all up.

“What are you doing?”
“Trying to remember what you just said so I can save it for later.”
“Come back.  I’m sure we’ll think up some more.”

Me: “I have to decide what chocolate I’m photographing this afternoon.   Right now after all that work I don’t even want to look at chocolate.”

Snickering commenced, followed by: “Then don’t look down.”

It was about that time it was discovered I had chocolate on the bottom of my feet and there was chocolate on the window sill.  (I really have no CLUE how it got on the windowsill.)  Sam took to both dramatically checking where he walked and taking big giant steps to avoid any suspicious smears on the floor.   Gwen and Sam also declared that caution tape ought to be put up.

After wiping up a dab of chocolate here and a dab of chocolate there for the umpteenth time, I finally decided (aloud) that the rest of the chocolate would be left where it was, as decoration.

Cue the pretend horrified looks.  To which I replied: “Alright. Fine.  I’ll never make you any chocolates again.  No more making a mess.  No problem.  Done deal.”

Them: “Oh, you mean we’re going to get some?!  You should have told us in the first place!”

I was then left alone in peace.  Or maybe I was left alone because lunch was over and they went back into the woodwork.

So: Making chocolates requires caution tape.   I don’t have any, so maybe I need to place an order.  Only instead of yellow, I really think the tape should be a pretty shade of you-guessed-it brown.    Because then if it gets splattered with the next batch of chocolates, nobody will know the difference.

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