Showing posts with label chocolate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chocolate. Show all posts

September 13 - International Chocolate Day

 Posted on September 13, 2021


This is an update of my post published on September 13, 2010:



Created by candy maker associations, this holiday inspires restaurants and bakeries to have special menu items or promotions—but we can celebrate it at home, too! Whether you prefer your chocolate dark, white or milk, grab a hunk of chocolate, or a cup of cocoa, or a bowl of chocolate chunk brownie-bits ice cream, or... Well, I could go on and on, but you get the idea:

Eat some chocolate today!

World Records


In Yerevan, Armenia, the world's largest chocolate bar was created in 2010 and was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. The 4,410-kilogram bar (or 9,702 pounds!) was made by Grand Candy factory. Its dimensions were 560 centimeters by 275 centimeters, and it was 25 centimeters thick. (That's about 18 feet by 9 feet, and 10 inches thick.)

In 2020, the Mars company set a record for the largest chocolate nut bar - actually, a Snickers bar the size of 43,000 single-size Snickers! - but then two weeks later, that record was broken by the Hershey company! The new largest chocolate nut bar was a HUGE Reese's Take 5 candy bar:


This enormous candy bar weighed 5,943 pounds and was 9 feet long, 5.5 feet wide, and 2 feet high!

Did you know...?

White chocolate contains cocoa butter, along with milk and sugar, but it doesn't have cocoa solids. The more familiar brown forms of chocolate (including dark, semi-sweet, unsweetened, and milk chocolate) contains cocoa solids and varying amounts of cocoa butter.


Chocolate can lower blood pressure and is linked to serotonin levels in the brain, which is why it can be a feel-good food. However, one alkaloid in chocolate, theobromine, makes it poisonous for some animals, including dogs and cats.

The English word chocolate comes from the Spanish word chocolate (spelled the same way but pronounced differently). Where did the Spanish word come from? Scholars aren't sure, but it probably came from a Mayan word or a Nahuatl word. (The latter is the language spoken by the Aztecs.) Certainly the world got chocolate from Central and South America, where cacao has been grown and used at least since 1100 BC (or BCE).



Now, though, about 75% of the world's cacao bean (chocolate) supply is grown in West Africa.




Here are some kid-friendly chocolate recipes! 















(always September 13 except on Leap Years)





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April 21 - National Chocolate-Covered Cashews Day

Posted on April 21, 2020

There are so many food days - days that celebrate one general or specific food. National Chocolate Day on October 28 and National Cashew Day on November 23 are two examples...and today's unity holiday brings together both of these yummy things!


To celebrate, eat professionally-made chocolate-covered cashews, OR cover some yummy cashews in chocolate yourself. Of course, many of us are stuck at home with no reasonable way to explain why buying chocolate-covered cashews is "essential" (COVID-19 lockdown), so we'll just have to dream about eating this tasty "remix."

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August 4 – National Chocolate Chip Day

Posted on August 4, 2016

Mmm...chocolate!

We have loads of chocolate things available to us, every day, in our grocery stores as well as restaurants, bakeries, drugstores, department stores, and even chocolatiers – special shops that sell nothing but chocolate!

We're talking candies, cookies, cakes, pies and other pastries, ice creams and other frozen treats, even weird treats like chocolate-coated bacon, pickles, onions, jalapenos, and other items that would seem to be odd to be coupled with chocolate!

In addition to all the bajillions of prepared chocolate foods, we can make our own chocolate treats using bars of unsweetened chocolate, cocoa powder, or (and this is my favorite) chocolate chips.

What are chocolate chips? They are small chunks of chocolate, often sold in flat-bottomed teardrop shapes. The original chocolate chip, sold by Nestle and at least one competitor in 1941, was semi-sweet chocolate—and that is the kind of chips I buy 99% of the time. However, these days chocolate chips come in bittersweet, mint chocolate, white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white-and-dark swirled, and other flavors as well as the best-selling semi-sweet chocolate flavor. They are also offered in several sizes. 


Taste tests give high scores to Trader
Joe's brand semi-sweet chocolate chips.
 Chocolate chips tend to be cuter shaped and a bit smaller than chocolate “chunks” - even though of course chocolate chips ARE chunks of chocolate. When you eat “chocolate chip” ice cream, the chips tend to be much more varied - but usually not teardrop shaped; maybe flat rectangular chunks of chocolate, or really tiny flakes and bits of chocolate, or larger chunks.



My personal two favorite ways to eat chocolate chips are in chocolate-chip cookies and Trader Joe's ice cream sandwiches, made from two chocolate chip cookies with vanilla ice cream between; tiny chocolate chips coat the edge of the ice cream.

Toll House Cookies

Have you ever heard chocolate-chip cookies described as “Toll House cookies”?

Back in 1937, a woman named Ruth Graves Wakefield was running an inn called the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. She added cut-up chunks of a semi-sweet Nestle chocolate bar to her cookie recipe – and her cookies were wildly successful. A couple of years later, Wakefield and Nestle made an agreement – her recipe would be added to the chocolate bar's packaging in exchange for a lifetime supply of free chocolate bars.

At that time, Nestle sold the semi-sweet chocolate bars, not just with the recipe printed on the wrapper, but with a small chopping tool included! But just a few years after that, the company started selling the familiar teardrop shaped chips – still with the recipe on the package, but no chopping tool needed!

Notice that Nestle packaging still has the Toll House connection!



Also on this date:



































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