February 2011 Chocolate of the Month

Where do all the Chocolate of the Months go when the month is over?

There is an archive page where my brilliant web guru, Erin, puts up a small snapshot of all the previous chocolates, but I want to remember them in all their many photo’d, overly prose’d glory. So, in the next few days I’m going to be putting up blog posts with details of the previous CotMs for posterity. Sound good?

Let’s kick things off with February!

The giant photo album of gorgeous photos of this month’s chocolate is online here—really, it’s worth a gawk.

February 2011 Chocolate of the Month: Valentine’s Bonbons

Here we are: the hot pink bullseye at the middle of the chocolate year. For this special Valentine’s month, I wanted to create a chocolate box that would encompass everything I know about love. Thus, this box represents what I see as the two key aspects of love. The sweet simple heart shape is filled with rosewater (dairy-free) cream, punctuated with a high note of pomegranate. It’s smooth and sweet as a Sunday stroll with the love of your life. This chocolate represents those beautiful, perfect, simple days where love makes you feel utterly content, adored, and safe. Nice. Fun. Cute. All that good stuff.

The anatomical heart, on the other hand, is the equally beautiful but often bloody and wild side of love: the kind of love that leaves your heart pounding, your pulse racing–an almost out-of-control intensity that can be a little terrifying, but is deeply healthy in the long run. This represents the kind of love that reminds you you’re alive in the deepest sense, for the times when your heart is raw and feels like it’s beating on the outside of your body. This is an intense bonbon. It’s a solid chocolate made with 66% dark chocolate, packed with lightly crushed cacao nibs, locally-roasted coffee beans, black salt enriched with volcanic minerals, and crunchy bits of bright dried cherries. It’s painted with red-tinted cocoa butter that’s colored with an all-natural beet juice-based food coloring, because while love does sometimes hurt, it shouldn’t have anything to do with anything fake–especially artificial food coloring.