If you’re a regular late-night chocolate indulger, and you’ve been suffering from a difficulty getting to sleep, it may be worth it to try enjoying that chocolate a little earlier in the day.
Chocolate is a stimulant. A mild one, but a boost nonetheless. It not only stimulates your taste buds, but the caffeine [...]
Some things just go together naturally and no one can necessarily explain why. One of these popular pairings is chocolate and romance. Chocolate is often associated with love and romance and we only have to think about Valentine’s Day to get some idea of how this sweet treat is used to woo a partner (or [...]
Here’s some good news for all you chocoholics – eating chocolate is good for you! Well, hang on a minute; let’s not get too excited just yet. I’m not saying that you can clear all the fruit and vegetables out of your cupboards and fill them with oversized chocolate bars and biscuits. ‘Everything in moderation’ [...]
As we’ve learnt, cocoa is a pretty versatile ingredient. As it’s naturally bitter in flavour it can be adapted for use in all kinds of food and drinks and can be used in both sweet and savoury dishes. It can also be turned into an alcoholic drink. Liqueurs often tend to be sweet and many [...]
Hot chocolate, drinking chocolate, a nice cup of cocoa – call it what you will but people have been enjoying the benefits of liquid chocolate for thousands of years. It was the ancient Mayan and Aztec civilisations that first discovered this drink, although, of course, it was rather a bitter concoction back in those days. [...]
Come on, admit it; who hasn’t been tempted to raid the baking box when the biscuit tin is empty and a swift chocolate fix is required? I’m not going to answer this one myself but suffice to say I don’t keep cooking chocolate in the house any more unless a baking session is imminent.
So, what [...]
Many chocolate aficionados don’t class white chocolate as being chocolate at all. Why, I hear you shout? Well, it’s a pretty persuasive argument I suppose. The fact is that white chocolate doesn’t actually contain any cocoa solids. It has cocoa butter, sugar and milk solids but no cocoa solids. I suppose it comes down to [...]
This is by far the most popular and widely consumed type of chocolate in the world. Its existence came about due to the diligence of a chocolatier called Daniel Peter in the 1870s. He was searching for a way to combine milk with cocoa to make a creamy, pale chocolate that was less bitter than [...]
It’s time to talk about the main types of chocolate now and I’m going to start with the purists’ choice – dark chocolate. And why is it the purists’ choice you might well ask? Basically, dark chocolate has the most amount of cocoa solids and therefore the most actual ‘chocolate’ in it. The higher the [...]
Unfortunately, chocolate production isn’t something that can really be done in a domestic kitchen very easily. It’s a shame as it would be great to be able to whisk up a batch of chocolate bars on demand. For the time being though, I think we’ll need to leave it to the experts and make do [...]