A broken ventilation system in a Swiss chocolate factory led to cocoa powder raining (or snowing, if you prefer) down on nearby towns.
The company says one car was lightly, and possibly deliciously, coated. It has offered to pay for any cleaning needed but hasn’t yet been taken up on the offer. — AP
I’ve got to say, I’d prefer a light dusting of cocoa to the wildfire smoke we’ve got around here.
Chocolate Dilemma cheesecake?
Don’t have time to go to Starbucks, but want something more than plain coffee? Here are some simple drinks you can make with ingredients that might be in your lunch room, or that you can easily keep at your desk.
Coffee + hot chocolate mix = mocha
Coffee + hot chocolate mix + cinnamon
Hot chocolate mix + mint-flavored black tea
Hot chocolate mix + cinnamon-flavored black tea
Hot chocolate mix + masala chai tea
Since I realized that this was more of a list of what you can do with hot chocolate mix, I’ve been meaning to fill in more detail for…well, months now. Apparently today is National Coffee Break Day, so I figured rather than letting it sit in the drafts folder forever, I’d post what I had in observance!
Remember the Battlestar Galactica cake? For last night’s LOST finale, Katie made an authentic DHARMA Initiative chocolate cake, and pizzas with the Swan and Orchid logos.
The cake is chocolate, with homemade buttercream icing (vanilla for the background, chocolate for the design). The pizzas have an outer ring of sausage, with bell pepper strips for the I Ching. The Swan logo is cut from a bell pepper. The Orchid is cut from a tomato, and placed on the pizza after baking.
For more views, including in-progress pictures, close-ups, and making-of commentary, check out the LOST finale food photos on Flickr.
I’m trying to make 8-hour old coffee palatable by adding both chai tea and hot chocolate mix. It’s…palatable.
After our trip to the nursery this weekend, Katie started seriously looking at our existing plants. We have a mint plant that got so pot-bound it grew down, through the drainage holes at the base of the pot, and back up the outside of the pot. She decided to make cuttings out of those bits… but what to put them in?
Well, she’d just finished off a container of baking cocoa…
The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf has a drink they call a Moroccan Mint Latte. It’s a tea latte with chocolate. You can get a fairly good approximation by making hot chocolate using mint tea instead of hot water. Katie suggested Bigelow Plantation Mint (after I mentioned that I’d tried it with Stash Moroccan Mint), which seems to work well.
Update: I forgot to mention the key difference between the two varieties of tea that I tried. Black tea works better with chocolate than green tea.
