Last Saturday we were three hours past the 24 hour mark and things turned out such that it was simply going to be me dealing with pouring and trying to temper the batch of chocolate we’d started the day before.

Nuts to that.

I got those molds set out and then just took it straight from melanger to bars. No whipping in pre-tempered shredded cocoa butter to try to get it to set into the correct type of crystal out of the seven different ones chocolate can turn into. No thermometer, no waiting for the right viscosity, just do it and be done. We knew how good it was going to taste regardless, and personally, I liked the cacao+sugar only idea.

It was glossy and glorious that night. In the morning there were little round dots. Over the week, some of them spread into big round dots and galaxies while others stayed stars in the distance. The bars became a bit crumbly.

But man do they taste good.

There was a fundraiser at my daughter’s office to raise money for Parkinson’s research, and in the Before days she had colleagues who quite looked forward to her bringing in homemade cookies and the like once a week.

So she made bake-your-own oatmeal chocolate cookie kits in quart mason jars and entered them in the raffle, specifying homemade chocolate in them, no less.

She chopped up about a pound of that batch, knowing that once it melted within the cookies the crystalline structure would both reset and not matter one bit, while trying not to use too much. I encouraged her to use however much she needed.

Then I asked her to make us some of those cookies; after all, we have more cacao nibs and if the termite guy next Tuesday says they have to tent the house, all food will have to be out of it. It is a lot easier to share chocolate cookies than nibs.

Thus the plan is to start another batch in the melanger tomorrow so that we can again have a Saturday to have to deal with the pouring and tempering (we’ll see) and the cleanup.

That stuff is SO good. It’s worth the decibel level.

And the thought suddenly hits as I type that that, yeah, do it now while I have the old hearing aids. Come Monday that machine is going to be sounding a whole lot louder to one of us.

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p.s. At about 4:29 in this video the first female falcon fledgling in San Francisco, named Rachel after Rachel Carson of Silent Spring fame, tried to do what her brothers had done and fly. It, um, didn’t go so well. Whoops! (She safely landed in another bay of the building 27 floors below where she’d jumped off from, so, no worries.)