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Category Archives: Chocolate

A New Kind of Drinkable Chocolate

Posted on July 1, 2008 by foodgal 6 comments

It’s not like hot cocoa. It’s not like hot chocolate. And it’s definitely not at all like chocolate milk.

Cabaret Brewed Chocolate is all together different. Rob Polevoi’s Oakland company brews whole cacao beans in water to extract every last bit of flavor. It’s similar to the way coffee is brewed from coffee beans, only this takes much longer.

The resulting liquid is mixed with just a bit of organic sugar, then reduced down to a concentrated syrup. Stir a teaspoon into a small cup of hot water and — voila! — you have brewed chocolate to enjoy. Each teaspoon weighs in at only 24 calories, too.

The beverage is light in body, akin to coffee. The taste isn’t heavy and super rich like that of hot chocolate. Instead, it is delicate, refreshing, and a little like chocolate-covered toffee in liquid form. It’s a very soothing drink to sip.

A 6-ounce jar is $14.95 and available online at the link above.

Cupcake Craze

Posted on June 17, 2008 by foodgal 14 comments

Cupcake mania, which hit New York first (“Sex and The City,” anyone?), then spread to Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, is finally making its way to the South Bay/Peninsula.

Talk about taking your sweet time.

While those metropolitan areas long have boasted stand-alone bakeries specializing in nothing but cupcakes, we who have been frosting-starved in the South Bay/Peninsula finally will get our baked-good due when Kara’s Cupcakes is expected to open two locations in September: one in San Jose’s Santana Row (next to Pluto’s), and the other in Palo Alto’s Town & Country Village. Because the Santana Row location will be tiny — just 300 square feet — it’ll have a smaller selection, but promises to showcase the bakery’s most popular flavors.

Kara Lind, who worked in marketing for Conde Nast, found her true passion when she attended Tante Marie Cooking School’s baking program in San Francisco. Her first Kara’s Cupcakes bakery opened in 2006 on Scott Street in San Francisco. Since then, she’s added a second location in San Francisco, this one at historic Ghirardeli Square.

The cupcakes are made daily with such premium ingredients as Scharffen Berger chocolate, Clover Dairy products, and Flying Goat organic coffee. Regular cupcakes, $3 each, come in flavors such as Buttery Buttermilk, Chocolate Velvet, and Kara’s Karrot. Filled cupcakes, $3.25 each, come in such decadent concoctions as the “Fleur de Sel” (a chocolate cupcake with caramel filling, ganache frosting, and sea salt).

What does Lind find so irresistible about cupcakes?

“They are just filled with so much happiness,” she says. “They are like a little piece of joy.”

Who can argue with that?

First Taste of A New Ghirardelli Chocolate Bar

Posted on April 22, 2008 by foodgal 7 comments

Ghirardelli’s newest flavor of chocolate bars and mini squares is just hitting the shelves: Milk Chocolate with Peanut Butter Filling.

Thanks to a high-placed secret source in the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory (we’ll call him Willy Wong-ka), we got a sneak preview. So will it give Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups a whipping? I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money” far end of the spectrum; 5 being the
“I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some” middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” supreme ranking.

Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate with Peanut Butter Filling: What I tried was one of the mini squares. It’s a very thin milk chocolate wafer with an equally thin layer of very creamy peanut butter inside, along with a few tiny, crunchy bits of peanut. Whereas a Reese’s cup gives you a wallop of homey, satisfying, dense peanut butter, the Ghirardelli’s is more subtle, perhaps a tad more elegant in taste. It’s hard to top a Reese’s, but the Ghirardelli’s is pretty darn good. Rating: 7.