Preview for ChocolateFest and Valentine's Day

Who likes chocolate? Yes, just what I thought! Chocolate is popular at any time, but Valentine's Day certainly provides a chance for it to take center stage. To help you gear up for the holiday, Whole Foods Woburn is hosting a Chocolate Fest on Saturday from noon to 2 p.m., and I've had a chance to sample some of the tasty treats you can try there. I'm sharing my notes as a preview to those of you who plan to get over there, and to serve as a shopping list in case you want to get some of these items for Valentine's but don't have a chance to do your own sampling on Saturday!

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed there aren't a lot of dessert posts here. I do focus most of my cooking energy on putting good meals on the table, and my own tastes run more toward the savory as opposed to sweets. That said, I do appreciate a tasty dessert from time to time. And perhaps, as more of an occasional rather than every day eater of chocolate, I can appreciate what I sampled even more? Every day chocolate eaters, feel free to disagree!

My first step in the sampling project was to spread out the chocolate samples and figure out what I might do with them. I figured I'd use a few of the items for cooking, and sample the others straight up. Below are some of the highlights of my experimenting!

Chocolate for wine? The first day I had the samples at home, I figured I'd try one or two for sampling straight up. I was curious about the Mast Brothers Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt, so that was the first one I opened. I liked the rich chocolate and modest sweetness, and found the salt gives a savory element. Yum! I had that first tasting bite before making dinner. After enjoying some good Kale Soup, there was a bit of the Portuguese red wine blend left. So I wondered how that would fare with some of the chocolate. It turns out that the salt element in the one from Mast Brothers made it a nice match for the wine. We compared that with the Lake Champlain Cherries and Chocolate. This bar is pretty tasty on its own, with rich, deep flavors. But it has a bit of a puckery element, which I found didn't go too well with the red wine. Overall, I'd say the Chocolate with Sea Salt was the better match for wine--and probably my preference overall, too.

Chocolate and Ginger: Next up in our sampling was the Chocolate Mexicano with Ginger from Taza Chocolate. I contemplated using this for some cooking, but the rich dark chocolate with just the right hint of ginger spice was too good eaten on its own to remain on hand for cooking later! (I had a little help sampling this.) Another reason to like this one, as if it were needed, is that Taza Chocolate is a local company, made in nearby Somerville, MA.

A few more tastes of chocolate! In service to my readers, I had a few more items to try and share about before chocolate fest. The Eastern Congo Initiative Vanilla Nib tastes a bit sweeter than some of the others I sampled, with tasty morsels or "nibs" of chocolate to give it a nice little crunch--definitely good eating by itself. The Pure Icelandic Sirius Chocolate has a nice clean, balanced chocolate taste. It's good on it's own, but I suspect it could be good as part of a baking project. We'll see if we can manage to save some for that!

Chocolate sauce for steak and strawberries: You may have already come across this recipe I posted a few days ago, so I figured I'd mention this toward the end of this roundup. The sauce for the steak wasn't quite as spicy as I was aiming for, but that actually worked out pretty well because there was a bit of the sauce from the steak as a base for the dessert sauce to dip the strawberries into. Yum!

Cherrybrook Brownies: I was excited to try making brownies from the Cherrybrook, so that my son could enjoy some of the chocolate goodies. Cherrybrook specializes in allergy safe baking mixes--we've previously enjoyed some of their cakes. Unfortunately, I noticed as we set out to make them that I didn't have the right pan size called for in the recipe. This led to frequent probing of the brownies and returning for more cooking a number of times, and we never quite got the texture right. I'll certainly give it a go again with the right pan, as the reviews I read of this online (while searching for cooking/pan size adjustment tips!) were very enthusiastic. While on the subject of allergy safe products, we also really like the Divvies cookies that Whole Foods carries. They also make a chocolate bar that I used to melt some chocolate for my son to dip his steak in--he concluded he liked both things plain better though.

Full disclosure: The chocolates mentioned in the post were provided as courtesy samples from Whole Foods Market Woburn. As always, the opinions and descriptions here are my own.