stop flicking my channels with your remote control!

I’ve just put the finishing touches to my newest chocolate creation for the market… umeboshi, vodka and two tone sesame (the white’s in the mix the black’s on the top) and doesn’t it look yummy! Completely at odds with the yumminess is that I think you might be able to forge my fingerprints off the one in the middle and use my identity to sneak into all the places that only I’m allowed to go to by virtue of fingerprint identification. Yeah, all of those places.

This week I’ve done a little changeup in the flavours for the market (I love how I can do that) since, although I love chili and cardamon chocolates so so so much, it really is a little dated and I can’t really justify calling it “adventurous” any more, which is what I do want my chocolates to be.

I really dislike how trends and fads hit the food industry as much as the clothing or music business. As soon as you find something awesome and new with serious cult appeal or edge or whatever you want to call it you find that everybody else is selling the same damn thing before you know it. I think saffron (Oh, and florals, but that’s been on its way for like a year now… just its really taking its time.) may well be the darling of the season for a while since both Paul A. Young and I hit on a combination with it in a ganache and Nobu have had a banana split with saffron and chocolate on their dessert menu for a good couple of months. I imagine it won’t be long before you start seeing it pop up more and more around and then by next year despite it’s incredible deliciousness people will look at it in my flavour list on the chocolate stall and think I’m some sorry ass second rate flavour man who can only catch on to things after they’ve already died.

Someone said that they simply weren’t interested in the chili and cardamon truffle last week because it was “old news”. What should that have to do with anything?! Either something’s delicious or it’s not, isn’t it?

I know I’m terribly guilty of only trying things once so that I can know what they’re like and then not really caring about them afterwards too…. but I defend my position by saying that I want to try EVERYTHING once and it’s just that I don’t happen to really like most things. No, that’s an outright lie. I like everything, but I think that almost everywhere screws almost everything up magnificently (Now I’m a liar and and arrogant loser, can you see my shining personality?). Almost always it seems there’s a right way of doing things and a popular or economical way of doing things and they just don’t coincide and once some people catch on to some other people doing something right then they do it too… only popularised or economised and ruin the thing’s PR for life. Look at what’s happened to poor old boeuf bourguignon… you can practically only eat if you pretend you’re doing it ironically or because of its oh-so-charming retro appeal thanks to the 80s (Thanks 80s) but it’s an awesome dish which you should go and cook! Ditto coriander and Thai food in ten years or so, mark my words! At least bistro food never had the appellation of “weird” that chili and chocolate at one time enjoyed, which is completely destroyed by any sort of popularity it attains. Anything that gets attention based upon it’s quirkiness is doomed to take a popularity plunge before too long. There are some things I do simply like above all others whilst doing my best to ignore anything external, but they really are few and far between and chili cardamon truffles happen to be one of those things and the fact that they’re going out of fashion and people will look at them like yesterday’s leftover tranny hookers before too long because they’ve fallen out of favour really upsets me.

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that the latest creation is me trying to give a whole great big hearty “fuck you!” to the food trends that may sweep by. I’m almost certain that pickled plums are never going to be the next big thing in terms of chocolate flavours… they’re just plain unappealing to Western palates, quite frankly it’s an awful choice of ingredient. Except that the chocolate is ridiculously delicious. The sesame rounds it out a touch and the base chocolate of Manjari really compliments it excellently with it’s sharp, short and sweet tones leading into the second round of pickled fruityness and vodka. YUM.

The only problem is… now that I’ve made I’ve just realised that I might be sitting on top of another rising trend without realising. I can’t see a glut of sour chocolate flavours appearing over the horizon just yet, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t waiting until I’ve got my back turned before launching themselves onto the stage and me in to mediocrity. I keep hearing positive things on the wind about chocolates with “raspberry notes” or “nice acidity” or whatever and everyone always thinks of zesty flavours in the Spring. Hmmmmm….. where can I go where fashion will never find me?

On a related note, I’ve always got sauerkraut in my fridge (it’s one of my unfashionable favourites) and so I think it’s high time I tried out some of the sauerkraut chocolate cake recipes that seem to be kicking around the internet before the sour chocolate fad takes off and it’ll look like I’m just jumping on the bandwagon.

Expect a recipe from me soon!

it’s tcho awesome!

Hahaha, check it out… truly the worst pun in the world right there. I should start giving all the blog entries terrible puns for titles, it would make me die a little on the inside, but it would be worth it for the pain I’d inflict on everyone else. Actually, that’s probably not a good thing at all.

What I really wanted to talk about though was this. TCHO is a silicon valley chocolate company and is basically THE geek chocolate (N.B. not the chocolate-geek chocolate, the geek-geek chocolate… subtle difference). This may be the single most exciting chocolate thing I’ve seen in ages and ages, partly because it’s a chocolate company doing something decidedly different and awesome seemingly because they think it’s a cool idea rather than based on some sort of carefully calculated marketing decision, but mostly because the whole beta testing and feedback really really appeals to my (not particularly) inner geek (N.B. that’s the chocolate-geek and the geek-geek). As soon as they start being able to send things UKwards I’ll be the first in line.

If you’re in America…. you bastard. Stop what you’re doing right now and click the bar of chocolate. It’ll take you to their shop. Buy their chocolate. Eat their chocolate and then confirm it’s awesomeness.

The whole no nonsense lets test and make the best damn chocolate ever and tweak it till it’s perfect because that’s how obsessively geeked out we are about the whole thing approach even goes down to the packaging. I have wet dreams about their packaging. I really feel that it says so much about their company and I really like what it says.

It seems that chocolate, like wine or whiskey or whatever, has a whole shroud of mysterious expertise surrounding it and so much of it is some sort of bullshit gimmick. There is chocolate that tastes good and there’s chocolate that doesn’t and although you do have to educate your palate to taste some of the differences, but the same can be and is true for any sort of food. Ever seen a chili cookoff? Those guys know when they’re eating good stuff and when they’re not, but they do it without any ridiculous airs or graces. Ramen, Chips, Jerk Chicken, Roast Duck Rice… they’re all junk food, but they’re all foods that can be differentiated on the teeniest little subtle details and THEY do it all without disappearing the wrong way up their own digestive tracts. TCHO at its heart seems to me to be all of the great bits of expert chocolate making without all the needless pretentiousness on the side and that makes me very happy.

Oh and while I’m on the whole geeky path I think I have a duty to point you to Jonathan Coulton’s website because he announced a week or two ago that he’d be coming back to do a gig/tour in the UK and you really need to go. You might know him as the guy who sung re:your brains or the ending song to Portal, but really give all of his songs a listen. I seem to remember having a realisation at the age of about 10 that pretty much every song I ever heard my parents play on the radio was about “wanting to hold you tight baby” or “oh, I miss you so much now you’re gone baby” or something completely uninteresting to an average 10 year old boy and that was what all music seemed to be about and whilst I now know there are songs with lyrics that do amuse me, it still makes me feel good inside to hear songs about DNA or mathematicians or Ikea or painfully rejected dorks dreaming of robot filled futures.

yay, a day on the market!

Saturday was the very first day at Cabbages and Frocks market and despite the downpours and the hail and freezing freezing cold it was fantastic! I think I even came away with just a touch of profit.

I have to admit that I was a little nervous for this week since I’d spent far too much of the week harassing people on the street with flyers (which was nowhere near as much fun as I’d imagined) and far too little time either preparing for the market or sleeping, but that all vanished into a little puff of chocolate flavoured smoke once Dawn (complete with an AMAZING poster, which is currently being flattened under Peter Greweling’s chocolate textbook) and Naomi turned up and from then on there were a constant stream of friends for the entire day. Thankyou so much to everyone who turned up and helped out… I would try to make a list, but I know I’d miss someone out and that would just be terribly horribly embarrassing, so I’ll just say…

Thankyou, you lovely people. You know who you are!

What was also really great were all the people I met. I was expecting the market to be pretty friendly, but it really outdid any expectations I had. By the end of the day I’d been given two cartons of milk and a plant and cupcakes and chocolate cake. It was really fabulous. Maybe eventually I won’t have to buy anything at all… the market will clothe me, the market will feed me and the market will furnish me, I can go off merrily on a Sunday and come back loaded with goodies. Eventually I’ll start trying to put customers off buying any of the chocolate from the stall so that I have enough left to give to all the market people (“Noooooo don’t touch that, I need it for my groceries damn it! Ummm…. it has the plague, if you touch it, then you’ll get the plague too!”) which will lead to me just going from market to market bartering goods in chocolate. After several years boxes of chocolate will be a viable second currency in the UK and I’ll be the chocolate king! That’d be fun.

Anyway, getting all off topic there, as well as the lovely market people who I was expecting to meet two (oh wait, three… but I only know two names) other fantastically interesting people stumbled across the stall.

Just before lunch a nice guy and his son bought a box of chocolates and we had a little chat about chocolate and what they all were and what was in them and what I was doing and it was really quite pleasant. I sort of thought at the time that it’d be nice to have regulars like that, but didn’t really think I’d made that big an impression. Fast forward to after lunch and they were back at the stall and the guy gave me his email address and number and told me that if I ever needed a financial backer if I decided to go all businessy with the chocolate then I should give him a call. How awesome is that? Potential investment just from being there on the market!

Even better than that though was as the day was coming to a close a really nice girl came to the stall who knew who knew lots and lots about chocolate! It’s always exciting to meet someone with a real passion for chocolate too and it’s even better when it’s actually backed up with some expertise.

And she said that my chocolates were good! (This is me glowing with pride.)

As it turns out, Jennifer runs Chocolate Ecstasy Tours – a company that does tours of the chocolate shops around London so small wonder that she has a love for chocolate – and now I’ve got a mention on her blog AND they’re taking a tour round to my stall next week after they’ve finished up with the shops in the area. Got to make something to impress… I’ve got days to think of something awesome!

Incidentally, Paddy, Matt and Jenny… you guys are now officially my “team”, it’s in print (in a blog) and that means it must be true! I didn’t know I had a team up until now and now that I do I think we should have badges or maybe hats or maybe matching wristbands… like the power rangers. Sweet.