The mound off the spoon.

And the molds–which I forgot to bang gently against the table a few times to get the air bubbles out, even though that’s why they’re sitting on a cookie sheet. Nobody will mind.

Molds: still nope. Refunded, reordered. Which didn’t solve the problem of our only having enough right now to process one pound into those pretty bars when multiple pounds would have taken the same amount of work to do–it’s like, y’know, free chocolate! Effort-wise, anyway.

So okay, one pound it is. We wanted to see how the next batch comes out, we no longer had enough to share, and that wouldn’t do.

Learned since the last batch: the reason it seemed a bit sweeter further down is that I’d barely processed the sugar that time, leaving crystals that were heavier than the chocolate crystals. The sugar sank. Not that you could tell in a bite of the stirred finished cooled chocolate. So this time I Cuisinarted that sugar till I had white fog wafting out the top–it was definitely good and fine this time.

(Scraping down the bowl. Yum.) Tomorrow! Tomorrow! We’ll pour it! Tomorrow! It’s only a day away…

Delivered, says the tracking.

Not so much, says me.

Either the mailman dropped it off at the wrong house (he does that–we joke that he’s trying to keep us neighbors in touch with each other), he checked off the wrong box on his screen, or someone stole the package.

In which case I can imagine the person opening it, looking at the wiggly silicone bar molds and going, Well, *that* wasn’t worth the felony.

A friend asked us how much chocolate we planned to make, after savoring the small bar we’d just handed him to try.

The answer, it seems to me, is, enough to make sure we always have at least a little on hand whenever we might like to have some for someone who stops by like he’d just done. Right?

The extra sets of molds should be here tomorrow, at which point we’ll be able to start a larger batch than the previous one-pounders.

Today we picked our daughter up on the way and discovered for ourselves why she loves Dandelion Chocolates in San Francisco so much. Wonderful, wonderful place: happy people, great pastries, and you can watch the chocolate coming to be, right there, while they offer you samples. Yum.

More on that later.

And then because my husband and daughter really love me they humored me in letting me spend a few minutes at Imagiknit nearby.

Before we left for the City, having read the weather reports, I grabbed a Malabrigo hat that matched my outfit just in case. The coldest winter Mark Twain supposedly spent was a summer in San Francisco, but the winters right by the ocean can be pretty brisk, too.

It came home again and got put back away unworn with the feeling that that just wasn’t quite it yet–but, something…

This evening we were heading out again and I found myself going back to that ziplock of recently-knit Malabrigo Mecha hats that were still here. I looked at the two teal ones and went no… They’re close, but not the one from this morning; this one instead. And stuck it in my purse.

We went to our Saturday evening stake conference (ie a semi-annual multi-ward meeting) and offered a ride home to a friend whose car had broken down.

We needed a few things on the way and so did Karen so that was easy; we stopped by Safeway.

She got a little ahead of me–there’s always something to be distracted by in a grocery store–and she stepped into a line behind a couple Richard and I recognized but don’t really know. She did, though. They had been at that meeting, too, and the wife turned to us and said she’d shivered through that whole thing and was still cold and wondered if we were as well? She was clearly seriously uncomfortable.

I was already silently noting how the hat in my purse matched her outfit.

How often do you get a chance to actually rescue someone from being cold in California? I told her happy birthday as I handed it to Karen to hand to her.

She tried to turn it down but when she saw I really and freely meant it she let me give it to her, gobsmacked and thrilled. It went right on her head and it was going to stay there. Her husband exclaimed over what a beautiful color it was.

Who else could it possibly have been for?

Besides, Karen (who had such a big grin on her face while being happy for her friend) already has hers.

The hearing aids needed cleaning and Los Gatos Birdwatcher where I buy my seed is less than a mile from there. So I combined the two trips, as I often do.

When the tech handed me back my ears I asked her, Do you like dark chocolate? Like, really dark chocolate?

She laughed at the highly unexpected question and said, I guess so, not knowing how dark we were talking here nor why on earth I was asking.

Well, we’ve been experimenting with our new toy… And I offered her one of the squares from our bars.

She laughed, she ate it, she was delighted at the idea of it and at my sharing. I’m not convinced she was entirely enamored of the actual chocolate, but she definitely went home that day with a story to tell.

On to the birdseed store.

Where there was a clerk I’d never seen before. She was warm, helpful, approachable, just a gem of a woman and after she loaded my twenty pound bag up for me I asked her the same question and got the same startled, laughing response–only this time with, I LOVE dark chocolate! Love it!

And oh she did.

She had no idea you could make your own. She sure does now, though.

I rather imagine soon she’ll have a story to tell me about her own.

Details in the mouseovers.

What it looked like from my driveway at the start of the day. I did not know yet how much it had wrapped around the fence; I knew it was pushing through it.

That photo with lots of small trunk pieces? That’s where the tree had split into multiple weak areas at bad angles.

Around 8 a.m. the crane arrived. There was no other way to take on such a giant. I tried not to get in the way, but I did get some pictures to document the redwood’s passing. The neighbor behind us walked over, saying he could see the top of it go from his house and had come to see, too, for awhile.

Section by section it came down, and the workers on the ground would trim the branches off so it could fit in the chipper, which looked very small by comparison. When they finally got to that monster section at the bottom hours later, there was no way; another truck showed up to haul that part off and the crane lifted it in.

I asked the worker nearest me if they were going to put the lumber to good use on that one, or?

The guy’s face conveyed, “I wish,” but he said no, it would just be chippered like the rest.

I went inside for awhile and when I came back out to check on the latest, another neighbor from down the street the other way was talking to Jim next door. The truck with the bottom section was gone, and when I regretted that out loud they went no, no–and she told me that she had asked them to drop it off in front of her house. Her husband would love to work with that wood.

Saved!

I have no idea how they got those huge pieces off the truck and in place–the crane hadn’t moved yet I don’t think. But they’re there now.

I’d been looking at that tree for nearly 32 years and yet the size of its footprint surprised me just the same in the end. They went at that, too, cutting away and down and through, trying to prepare it for the stump grinder people, but in the process removed this small fairly flat piece that, with the neighbors nodding yes, I took home.

If only I were a woodworker. But I couldn’t let all of it just be gone forever. Maybe I’ll get to learn something new. (Hey, I know whose door to knock on now.)

Alright, here are the highlights.

What the guy is cutting in the last picture is around where what I took home came from. 

I was at my lupus group meeting today for the first time in months. I don’t go when I’m contagious: it’s too dangerous to the others. Which means I missed September, October, November, and December. Been awhile, and I’ve been missing my friends.

There is someone there whose story is not mine to tell, but let’s just say that the hat I knit her awhile ago was both quite needed and, it turns out, better received than I had any idea: she told me how warm it kept her, how much she’d loved it all winter, that she wore it practically every day.

And that she’d lost it.

She was wearing a purple jacket as she was saying this and I knew in that instant that what I had would match it perfectly. The hat that had bugged me to finish it, that my elbow had yelled over, that had already taken three days when normally it would have been done in one, that I finally made myself just sit down and do after Anne’s box came so that it would be finished and I could be done with it and go on to Anne’s yarns (which I did). I cast off with both satisfaction and frustration: why had this commanded so much of my attention, at a gauge that’s painful right now, when I didn’t even have a recipient in mind.

Oh…!

“I just finished a purple one,” I told her, and her face lit up and she sat up a little straighter right then and there.

I handed her my phone at the Add Contact page so that I would know where to mail it and she wouldn’t have to wait till mid-February for the next meeting to get it. We do not live close to each other.

I got home from that meeting with just enough time to run in the yarn ends (oops–hadn’t done that yet, it was just a stash FO), drive to the post office, and get it in the mail before it was time to go get Richard.

Knowing some of the things she’s gone through, and knowing now how much what I’d made had meant to her, you bet she was getting another hat. And in a different color in case she ever finds the first one.

Man, that felt good.

The other thing she asked me?

To teach her how to knit.

You knew this would be coming soon. Round two.

Just one pound again, because we’ve learned that that’s how much our set of four molds holds so we ordered two more sets but they won’t be here for a few more days.

Mistake made: if you have one, you’re supposed to Cuisinart the nibs and the sugar, separately, to make the conching faster and the nibs easier on the machine. This time I ground the sugar first.

But wait, he points out, looking at the bowl coated in a fine white afterwards (did some of it powder and then melt from the friction?) They said having the sugar touch the chocolate magically transforms the flavor to stop it from changing any more right at that point–do we want to stop it before it even starts? Would it, so early on?

He got out the second Cuisinart bowl (that I’d long forgotten existed.) I wiped down the only blade with a dry paper towel. Next time we will remember and pulse the nibs first.

So the melanger is working its initial magic and the sugar has yet to be poured in. But it’s ready.

Addendum the next day: we put the sugar in at about an hour forty-five minutes in last night. This evening, we put a metal mixing bowl in the oven at 100F so that the chocolate won’t cool too much too fast. Measured 4 g Mycryo powdered tempered cocoa butter, which comes to roughly a tablespoon for the pound of nibs we used. Poured the chocolate in the bowl, which was warm but 15F cooler than the stirring chocolate was, mix that powder in thoroughly and quickly, and then poured our mix into the molds.

I noted for the first time that the chocolate in the grooves of the rollers I’m starting to clean was sweeter than elsewhere.

The toyon berries, which were orange for a long time, are ripe and red and the robins are going to town–there was a large flock of them dashing back and forth past the window all day. They didn’t like my moving towards them with a camera but there were at least three still hiding as I snapped.

Occasionally there will be stories in the news about birds getting drunk on fermented berries. From what I’ve read, that’s an urban myth: they’re not drunk, they simply eat too many in the sudden abundance to the point of the weight of their food making it hard to fly, much less gracefully.

The toyon is an understory to the big redwood which is coming down on Thursday (and thankfully did not do so on our house in the big windstorm Saturday–it is not a healthy tree.) It may be flawed, but it’s beautiful, its trunk intricate and 53″ wide, and we will all miss it. How big a change it will be I don’t know yet.

Hopefully the toyon will be fine with its shade suddenly gone.

But that redwood has to go before the hawks start nesting in it. And before it does any more damage to ours.

For Christmas a year ago, our chocolate-enthusiast youngest (wonder where he got that from?) gave his sister some cocoa butter in powder form that had been crystallized so as to properly temper chocolate. She wasn’t sure what to do with it at the time, but it still seemed fine yesterday as far as we could tell and would be a shortcut method to getting a proper temper, so we tried vigorously stirring 1% worth into the new chocolate as we poured it out of the melanger.

Which has to be where the speckles came from? But the swirls on just the one…?

Our bars came out of those molds not looking like anything we’d seen before nor expected but that chocolate definitely had the shine and snap of a good tempering, no matter what they looked like. I think the marbling pattern on the one is pretty. Just don’t ask me to reproduce it–I have no idea how we did that.

Wrapping them in aluminum foil was a bit of a comedown, but hey.

Tonight we were celebrating our friend Betty’s 94th birthday at church: a choral group sang for her, Russ and Jim played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as a duet on the pipe organ and grand piano, and Phyllis told stories on the life of the woman she thinks of as her adopted aunt. (She works near Betty’s nursing home and drops by often.)

Betty’s been blind since birth. We noted that Phyllis did not tell the story of the time Betty decided her late husband was too drunk to drive them home so she was going to do it, and did. Betty loves music, and tried learning the piano as a kid but found the accordion easier to find where her fingers should go and so that was her instrument. The lady is a kick, and she is fearless.

She had guide dogs for 71 years till old age caught up with her and she misses them.

She is mostly bedridden now but she made it through the evening in a wheelchair.

Richard had tucked one of our brand newly made bars of chocolate in his pocket on the way out our door.

Betty did like dark chocolate, she said, but couldn’t eat any more tonight. So the ironic thing is that it got shared in small pieces with just about everybody but her, but she and they had a fine time and that was the point.

One person had gotten her a birthday present: a long soft stuffed dog to hold across her lap in memory of all the dogs she’d loved, like a lap blanket to keep her warm on this cold and rainy day. She stroked it and then rested her hands on it and loved that her beloved dogs were thought of, too.

It had a face with the colors of a Saint Bernard but in the shape more of a German Shepherd.

I told her about my grand-dog the (mostly) Saint Bernard. She answered that German Shepherds in her experience were smarter and she liked those; I laughed and agreed and said that our Ludo is very sweet to our oblivious toddler grandson whose parents are working to teach him how to be nice to the dog, but she is emphatically not overly bright. (As I pictured Mathias’s gleeful, “PupPY?”) She’s good with him, and that’s what they need.

I hope someone brings a real dog by sometime for her to pet. I do know we need to stop by with some chocolate for when she can eat it. Maybe not quite so dark on that batch.

So I took this picture not long after we started the melanger going. I had toasted one pound of nibs on a cookie sheet at 350 for ten minutes. They smelled maybe done at nine and a half but the instructions I’d found online for nibs (the Dandelion book is all about the beans) had said 10-15. Don’t do fifteen. I waited those last thirty seconds and they came out threatening to taste burned, I worried at the time. Which is part of why that’s all that went into the first run: I had to know if I’d wrecked them.

Then I ran them through the food processor (per the book) to cut way down on the conching time.

But wow, the conching does marvelous things to this. No more worries about it being burned. Such a different flavor from raw, and even from straight out of the oven. And that was just in the first hour.

I ran the sugar through the Cuisinart too and added it in slowly, slowly, wait and then a bit more, about 90 minutes after the nibs had gone in, but it was such a small batch that I probably could have just dumped the whole thing in and the machine would have done just fine.

Masonis said that whatever the changing chocolate tastes like when the sugar hits it is what you’re going to get, that somehow the sugar freezes the flavor in place at whatever it is at that point.

(Turning it off briefly an hour later and sampling.) I can handle that. Wow. Yes. This will most definitely do. It reminded me of the time years ago when I asked someone why she went to the effort to knit socks, which would just get worn through anyway and wreck her work?

In response she handed me one to try on.

I had had no idea. I’d never had a sock feel like that on my foot in my life. So comfortable: it was revelatory.

That sense of epiphany was what tasting the tip of that spoon of fresher-than-anything-in-your-life chocolate was like, and it isn’t even done yet.

So there’s this particularly good chocolate maker in San Francisco that’s been trying to fill in the gap from where Scharffenberger left off after it was sold to Hershey’s at the passing of one of the founders.

It turns out the co-owner of Dandelion Chocolate wrote a book. I thought it was going to be all about the creation of his company.

So, being a fan and it being Christmas, I ordered a copy for my sweetheart, having no idea that it was a how-to with the guy open-sourcing to the world what he’d learned and how to do it.

Note that clicking on that title is surely how The Big River in South America dangled a ‘people were also interested in…’ page at me awhile later, even though at the time I had no idea whatsoever how I’d landed there.

Because, as it turns out, within those pages the author highly recommended the Premier Melanger for the hobbyist or start-up.

We had never heard of such a thing. A countertop cocoa bean grinder and concher? Who knew?

We had been hoarding Discover points on Amazon for some time for some future Big Unexpected Thing, or Thing We Will Wish We Had Saved Up For whatever that thing might turn out to be, and when I saw this and showed it to him we both agreed that that Thing was right there in front of us. Because how could you do better than this in the search for something to surprise, delight, to last a very long time to come while never letting go of being a total blast to play with?

Per the instructions, we put two cups of sunflower oil in it last night after it arrived (it was the anticipated big box that came after Ann’s big box) and let it run for an hour and then hand washed it. (No dishwashers on this thing.) You can’t start a batch immediately after: a single drop of unseen water will change the crystalline structure and cause the chocolate to seize into an unmeltable lump. We had to wait.

Yes I definitely think this is going to be fun.

A name. It needs a name. Choc Chop? Criollo de Couer? Elle El Bean?

I know she didn’t do it to be thanked but I’m going to out loud anyway.

A little Anniversario, she offered? I’m never going to use it.

If you’re sure? I’d love!

And so a box showed up today that was big enough that I thought it was something entirely different that I’d been waiting for (more on that to come.) There were three and one dyelot-wise skeins of that Rios colorway, the prettiest rendition of Solis ever, an experimental Malabrigo run in merino/cashmere picked up at Imagiknit, and another in baby merino, spun thick… Yarn, yarn, more really good yarns–that photo just shows the top layer.

Wholly cowed–can I even do justice to all this? So soft. So pretty. 

So blown away. Thank you, Anne!

(P.S. And then she told me not to knit it for her but for other people. She’s on to me.)

Having learned the hard way with quite a few lesser versions myself, I warned Maddy, who had just turned four, that if you pull the tape out all the way it will break and it won’t go back in anymore.

She doesn’t know how far all the way would be so she was being pretty cautious (so far so good). But watching that thing ziiiiiiiiipping back into itself–she did a little leap and a laugh each time.

I’d actually given it to her mom but it quickly proved how useful a distraction it could be to a kid needing attention or distraction: we could measure things together.

And so we did. Going around her instep matched the width of her wrist. Who knew? Around just her heel: same number. Height, head, hand… She’d owned the number four for less than a week but now she had all these other numbers that were just hers, too!

If only I’d known when my own kids were little how small and yet how engrossing a game I could have had in my purse all that time.

(Lantern Moon crocheted beaded tape measure from Vietnam, bought at Uncommon Threads in Los Altos, CA.)