YC Beginner:
Ask your librarian for a book about the history of chocolate for children. Some suggestions: Smart About Chocolate! by Sandra Markle, No Monkeys, No Chocolate by Melissa Stewart and Alan Young, or Chocolate: Riches from the Rainforest by Robert Burleigh.
Over the past year, we have read all three. Fallon's favorite was No Monkeys, No Chocolate because it had a funny, repetitive title and could be read independently in the back seat of the car. Mom's favorite was Markle's Smart About book because it could be read in one snack sitting and summarized the main points from the Coe's book about chocolate for grown ups. Burleigh's book was the burliest with text-heavy pages that required reading in installments, but we agreed that it had the most realistic and interesting pictures. Prior to joining the sisterhood, we even visited a chocolate plantation on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Fallon's cousins are honorary chocolate experts because one the rental car keys got locked inside the car by accident and they had a whole day devoted to taste testing different chocolate varietals while waiting for AAA to rescue them.
YC Intermediate:
Sample 3 different types of chocolate: dark, milk and white. Can you taste the difference with your eyes closed? Which was your favorite?
We had a Ghirardelli flight which we hid in plastic eggs to blind taste test. We both liked 60% Cacao. Fallon had to spit out 100% cacao. Mommy wanted to spit out white chocolate but that tied for first place with Fallon. Strangely, Fallon preferred 60% to semi-sweet despite its 2 grams less sugar. We studied the labels and discovered they have 9-7-5-0 grams of sugar per serving respectively.
Pick out a chocolate recipe to make with your farmgirl mentor.
Balboa peninsula is close to our house and famous for square Klondike-like Balboa Bars and chocolate covered bananas. Every few months, we have a "banana emergency" when several racks of bananas in ripen in the yard and our little family of 3 has to figure out how to eat/freeze/donate several hundred pounds of bananas in short order. They are like the zucchini of southern California. We found the smaller sized variety is perfect for sticking a popsicle stick in, freezing, and then dipping in tempered chocolate and refreezing. If you have extra chocolate, you can dip strawberries in to use it up (they hold up a little better in the fridge than the freezer). The zeppelin-sized bananas on our other tree work better cut in half so a kid has a prayer of being able to finish it. In a pinch, if you don't have chocolate chips to temper, you can dunk the pops in a deep container of Nutella. Mom is still tinkering about how to dilute the tempered chocolate to make a thinner coating with cocoa butter.
YC Advanced:
Make your own chocolate recipe and serve to your family. Tell them about the process of chocolate making while they're sampling.
Fallon experimented with a few recipes (chocolate mug cakes, chocolate mochi wrappers, hot chocolate) but we always come back to some variation on chocolate covered banana popsicles. Sometimes they are dusted with peanuts, sometimes with unicorn horn sprinkles, sometimes dunked in a Costco-sized vat of Nutella instead of tempered chocolate chips. While we taste-test these, we page through the three titles in the beginner section which are now a cherished part of our library.
Read the book or watch the film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Bonus points for doing both.
Can we apply for bonus-bonus points? We read Roald Dahl's book, then watched both the 1971 and 2005 adaptations, comparing the use of Squirrels vs. Golden Geese and the portrayal of Oompa Loompas. We then hosted Fallon's fifth birthday in a park around a Charlie theme. We invited guests with a mini candy bar wrapped up with a golden ticket that some of her friends parents comment that their kids kept even 2 years later. Guests could then visit stations where they dressed up as Mike TV with funny sunglasses and "teleported" across the playground, Violet Beauregard in a giant inflatable blueberry bubble and optional blue face zinc sunscreen, or Augustus Gloop at the hot chocolate bar.
********
Beginner:
Read The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe.
Finished and posted on Goodreads around this time last year. The research in this book fueled a trifold poster board presentation we shared at my daughter's history festival while they ground away at maize and cacao beans.
Pick out a chocolate recipe to make with your farmgirl mentor.
Balboa peninsula is close to our house and famous for square Klondike-like Balboa Bars and chocolate covered bananas. Every few months, we have a "banana emergency" when several racks of bananas in ripen in the yard and our little family of 3 has to figure out how to eat/freeze/donate several hundred pounds of bananas in short order. They are like the zucchini of southern California. We found the smaller sized variety is perfect for sticking a popsicle stick in, freezing, and then dipping in tempered chocolate and refreezing. If you have extra chocolate, you can dip strawberries in to use it up (they hold up a little better in the fridge than the freezer). The zeppelin-sized bananas on our other tree work better cut in half so a kid has a prayer of being able to finish it. In a pinch, if you don't have chocolate chips to temper, you can dunk the pops in a deep container of Nutella. Mom is still tinkering about how to dilute the tempered chocolate to make a thinner coating with cocoa butter.
YC Advanced:
Make your own chocolate recipe and serve to your family. Tell them about the process of chocolate making while they're sampling.
Fallon experimented with a few recipes (chocolate mug cakes, chocolate mochi wrappers, hot chocolate) but we always come back to some variation on chocolate covered banana popsicles. Sometimes they are dusted with peanuts, sometimes with unicorn horn sprinkles, sometimes dunked in a Costco-sized vat of Nutella instead of tempered chocolate chips. While we taste-test these, we page through the three titles in the beginner section which are now a cherished part of our library.
Read the book or watch the film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Bonus points for doing both.
Can we apply for bonus-bonus points? We read Roald Dahl's book, then watched both the 1971 and 2005 adaptations, comparing the use of Squirrels vs. Golden Geese and the portrayal of Oompa Loompas. We then hosted Fallon's fifth birthday in a park around a Charlie theme. We invited guests with a mini candy bar wrapped up with a golden ticket that some of her friends parents comment that their kids kept even 2 years later. Guests could then visit stations where they dressed up as Mike TV with funny sunglasses and "teleported" across the playground, Violet Beauregard in a giant inflatable blueberry bubble and optional blue face zinc sunscreen, or Augustus Gloop at the hot chocolate bar.
********
Beginner:
Read The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe.
Finished and posted on Goodreads around this time last year. The research in this book fueled a trifold poster board presentation we shared at my daughter's history festival while they ground away at maize and cacao beans.
Sample your local chocolate artisan's wares. Learn the difference between dark, milk, white, etc.
I discovered Royce Origin chocolates on a field trip to an Asian grocery store/Ramen shop (Mitsuwa). The flavor notes (pictured below) were very helpful to build a starting vocabulary about bitterness, fruitiness, floral, etc. once I translated them from Japanese. From there, I branched out to the online merchant Caputo's to better understand if *all* Ecuadorian chocolate is floral, what percentage of cacao is interesting and palatable for nibbling, etc.
Intermediate:
Learn about cocoa beans: where they're found, and the work that goes into turning them into chocolate.
From perusing the single origin chocolate interactive maps on the Caputo's website, I had moved on to reading Rowan Jacobsen's book Wild Chocolate last August 2025. This helped bring me up to modern times with the chocolate industry. Now I can better appreciate the difficulty in standardizing fermentation protocol across numerous small growers and how allowing some wiggle room for differences can create so many different nuanced flavors.
Learn how to temper chocolate.
I would not say my chocolate tempering is fail-proof yet. The "melt" step is straight-forward with a double boiler and I usually quit when the end result is workable rather than keeping an eye trained on a thermometer. I am experimenting with holding 1/3 of my chips back to add once the original chips reach 115* F in order to drop the temp of the combined mixture down to 82*-85*F and then put it back on the heat to bring it back up to 88*F since our chips are right at that borderline between milk and dark chocolate. I would say for the Balboa Banana "Emergencies" the factors which are higher priority to me than perfect tempering are (1) thinning the chocolate with cocoa butter so that I can cover more bananas with the same amount of chips (while simultaneously increasing the fruit:added sugar ratio for my kid's dessert of choice). (2) dipping a frozen banana (or a dozen) into the mixture dramatically drops the temperature of the dwindling volume of chocolate. So I am puzzling out how to keep the finish smooth on those final bananas when the mixture is starting to seize up and get lumpy. Do you have any tips? Please share?
Make two different chocolate recipes that you've never tried before. Remember, chocolate doesn't have to be sweet; it can be savory, too. (Try a Mexican mole, a delicious sauce used in enchiladas.)
Mole Negro [12/24/2025] - made with a starter from a favorite Oaxacan restaurant. I modified the recipe a lot (canned tomatoes vs. tomato sauce, miso paste vs. chicken broth, Ghirardelli squares vs. "authentic Oaxacan chocolate," and slightly less overall liquid because I was worried about boil over). This made a flavorful salsa to cover several jars of "glass burritos" which are basically just prepped beans and a few toppings as an easy re-heatable meal. We also found this mole was helpful to add a kick to Mexican rice we cooked intentionally mild to be accessible for Fallon. Eventually, I was even using it in lieu of salad dressing!
Copycat Nutella [12/28/2025] - a while ago, Fallon and I reached an agreement that if she started the day working through piano exercises, there would be a Grand's style biscuit slathered in Nutella (or equivalent) waiting for her at breakfast. She's in her 3rd method book and we have gone through so many of those cardboard pop rolls and those nut butter jars that are just a little too gooey to recycle in good faith but then get all weird and distorted when you try to clean them with super hot water. Our local grocery doesn't stock Nutella brand (which has palm oil as its second ingredient which is a bit cringe-worthy anyway) and the alternative includes almonds which really mute the hazelnut notes. So when I found a Vitamix blender under the Christmas tree, I was anxious to try making some copycat nut butters I could decant into the classic mason jar and give myself a zero waste gold star. Well, what they don't show on the videos is how often these puppies overheat (or maybe I just have a dud?). It overheated blending frozen bananas! But I digress. Many 40 minute cooldowns later, I have a delicate jar of "Belletella" from following chocolatecoveredkatie's recipe. I added milk to thin it to a spreadable consistency so I store it in the fridge instead of considering it shelf-stable. But it is so good! You know those things you are relieved are a little fussy to make so you have a prayer of achieving your body composition goals? Yep. This is one. and I am sitting slightly prettier on my January trash audit! Here it is on some "I Might Die Tomorrow" white bread from a MJF cookbook.
Expert: To be continued!
Learn how to make ganache.
Try an authentic hot-chocolate drink. If no one in town offers one, learn to make it yourself and share the results. What makes it different than the overly-sweet concoctions you get from the envelope?
Host a Truffle Party. Make and serve at least 4 different types of homemade chocolate truffles.
No comments:
Post a Comment