Picture Carole King singing, “C’mon, c’mon and doooo, the cocoa-motion with me.” This is the still-stalled hot cocoa-inspired shawl of hand-dyed Malabrigo baby merino, waiting its turn in the knitting lineup. I’ve got the pattern ideas all written up, I just have to finish actually doing it.
And yes, I do like my mug of hot cocoa in the brisk foggy mornings here. No worries about lacking cocoa anti-oxidants.
When my husband was living in France for two years as a missionary, he learned to appreciate blue cheese, Brie, and good European chocolate (not necessarily together), and the waxy Hershey’s type never had the same appeal for him again. Gradually he got me to see the light. And then, after we moved to California, two men decided that their latest start-up venture was going to be collecting antique chocolate manufacturing equipment from Europe a la Sandra Boynton‘s book “Chocolate: the Consuming Passion,” (you have SO got to get that little book, we laughed till we cried, over and over), to research the process, select the best cocoa beans, ferment them in the sun longer than Hershey’s lets theirs do, and to create the best chocolate in the world. Beat Valrhona! Go team go! Yay!
And so they did. Scharffenberger was set up in a building in Berkeley built just before the 1904 earthquake–how it survived that, I’ll never understand. Our friend Tom gathered up I think it was 30 interested people (it wasn’t hard; free samples? Twist our arms) to carpool up together by appointment one Saturday as an official tour, and they opened the factory doors to us and took us through.
At the time, they had an employee whose job was to wrap every bar by hand: they’d bought a wrapping machine and been unable to fit it through the doors of the old place. Oops. Looking up at the ceiling, it wasn’t flat across, but rather an artsy wavy line in an up-and-down pattern, the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else–made entirely of bricks. I just heard everyone in California wince. Yes. Bricks crumble in earthquakes. Watch your head. And this is close to the San Francisco Bay, where the sandier land is more likely to amplify the shakes.
Anyway, I thought I’d never touch a Hershey bar again. But I took the kids on a tour of the Hershey plant in the Central Valley, where you pass by almond orchards on the way there, and I do have to admit that an extremely fresh Hershey almond bar eaten in the context of such an intensity of chocolate fumes is quite good.
I was at Trader Joe’s after Scharffenberger finally got a bar-wrapping machine going and their sales volume was markedly increasing, and a worker was wheeling over cases of the very first-ever Scharffenberger bars they were going to sell in that particular store. Just as soon as the guy got those boxes open. I stood next to them, waiting (standing guard, if you really want to know) while he ran for a box cutter, and I got the very first bars to come out of the very first box. Mine! The guy handed them to me with the biggest grin on his face, watching me: I was like a little kid on Christmas morning. Timed that shopping trip right!
Later, trying to break into the upper-end chocolate market, Hershey’s, after swearing absolutely not to touch Scharffenberger’s way of doing things, bought them out, so I guess my Hershey count is greater than zero after all, not to mention that Sandra Boynton was right again. So far, though, still so good. So very good. My daily morning mug would be Scharffenberger, too, but I can’t afford it. Gotta leave some yarn money in the budget.