Chocolate – Near and Far

Chocolate – Near and Far was Originally Posted on July 6, 2013 by lavarock

My friends went to Switzerland which is not odd. What is a bit odd, is that there is a halau there. A halau is a hula school. The Swiss halau wanted to celebrate their anniversary by inviting members of their “sister” halau from Hawaii. My friend is a Hawaiian musician.

He and his wife graciously brought me a Swiss chocolate bar, which I savored for minutes as it disappeared

On the side panel is a list of ingredients, unfortunately none of the translations are English. I was able to bring up their webpage, copy one ingredients listing and popped it into Google’s Translation website.

Ingredients / tech. information
Ingredients: Sugar, hazelnuts 21%, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, whole milk powder, skim milk powder, butterfat (milk), emulsifier: soy lecithin, flavors. Cocoa: 34% minimum in the chocolate.

So, that was my desert tonight

So that is the far chocolate story. The near chocolate part involves the item that I was growing cacao to make my own chocolate. Unfortunately all 4 trees died because they needed more shade than I could give them. I had such high hopes that I could take the chocolate and perhaps mix in a bit of orange peel. If you have not tasted orange-flavored chocolate, you are missing something good. Still, making chocolate is more work that I could really handle, so I guess not having cacao trees is not the worst problem.