sometimes life just is not fair

I know what you’re thinking from the title, but before you turn your eyes away, let me say that this post is completely free from doom and gloom . Undoubtedly some things haven’t exactly gone the way that they could have, but I can’t see the point in bemoaning the course of life. There is, however, a lot of fun to be had from laughing at its eccentricities and something has just surfaced in the past few days which give me far too much smug glee for me not to share.

On Monday I visited the dentist for the first time in years. It felt like time for a checkup and more pressingly a while back I had a little bit of pain when I ate ice-cream and after a quick tooth inspection I found that I had a little black dot which looked an awful lot like a bit of enamel decay. The obvious explanation was that a diet consisting in a large part of chocolate and porridge with dulce de leche had finally taken its toll and so I was fearing the worst, but it turns out I was wrong! Admittedly I do have a bit of a problem with sensitive gums caused by the bit of metal left in from some old othodontics (and hence the ice cream pain) and some sort of little black stain, but apart from that my teeth are healthy, really quite unreasonably healthy. If having chocolate for breakfast on most days and caramel on the others isn’t a surefire way to tooth decay then I don’t know what is.

There is also a second part to my smug glee. I don’t have a set of bathroom scales in my flat and so I haven’t had a chance to weigh myself in ages and ages, I suppose I have been home, but I haven’t been into my parents’ bathroom (where the scales are) in ages and ages so I haven’t thought of it. On Tuesday though I did think of it and it turns out, as if it weren’t already bad enough that I’d avoided one of the dangers of a diet mostly based on candy, that I’ve also lost weight. Apparently all the chocolate I could want throughout the year and a huge amount of holiday eating adds up to a slightly lighter me.

Maybe people hate me a little for it, but I think it’s hilarious.

Anyway, this little self centred tidbit is also my return to regular blogging. Now that I’ve stopped doing the market I would still like to stay vaguely visible for anyone who would like to follow and also not doing the market means that what I do do with chocolate won’t be a repetitive grind and could actually make for interesting reading again. There’s the mail order club coming up and there’s certainly something else in the works that could well be the greatest chocolate thing ever. I’ve been spending far too much time on howstuffworks in preparation for it. Be prepared.

make a note of it

Trying to get back home from central london at 4am…. not a good idea.

Bananas, water and sieu yuk are the ultimate in hangover prevention.

Right now, I need sleep.

oops

Oh dear, I missed out a day in the blog yesterday and I did leave a drunken note here at about 6 in the morning, but thankfully pressed “save” rather than “publish”. I’m not sure why I waited until now to write anything more, but it just seems that’s the way that my body says I should write now.

The website’s starting to look a fair bit prettier, but still doesn’t have any information on it sadly… there’s just so much messing about with image editing programs you can do and just trying to get the right levels on everything takes so so so long. I definitley do want to do it all on my own though, since I’m not sure how much anyone else could be as anal with the whole thing as I’m being, plus it’s actually getting quite fun.

I’ve also been thinking a bit about the things that the shop’s going to sell once it’s up and running and I’ve decided that it would be really awesome to do a range of chocolate bars in the shop. Tempering is a little tricky, but once I do it a couple more times I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it, the thermometers all itching to be used sitting down there in the kitchen. I can feel its eager eyes boring into my mind and its little voice through the floor saying “use me! use me! use me!”. Either that or it’s my inner scientist desperately looking for something with numbers and technical trickyness to do. If you want to know about tempering properly then just plug it into google and read everything that comes up, they disagree a little bit so you can pick which one to trust. Basically though it’s all to do with getting a uniform size of crystal in the cocoa butter and making sure that they’re small and all the right sort. If it’s too hot then you’ll get nothing and if it’s too cold then you’ll get a mushy speckly dull mess, but get it in that magical 4 degrees window for as long as is humanly possible makes amazing beautiful chocolate so solid it makes Arnie’s abs look like play-do and diamonds look dull. It’s all about the magic! Once I get that right I can start doing fun stuff like making my own variants of bars by putting fun stuff in them or trying to make bars of milk/white chocolate with insanely small amounts of sugar… yesss!