Madame Cocoa's Blog (3)

Goodbye to a pioneering location for American artisan chocolate....



or as the guys at SFist put it: -- Scharffen Berger Soon To Suck --



Apparently production will move to a Hershey plant in Illinois. Sad, and disappointing. Here is the text from the SFGate.com article (I can't get the hyperlink to work, sorry) --



(01-27) 18:28 PST -- The Hershey Co. said Tuesday it plans to close Scharffen Berger's West Berkeley manufacturing plant as well as the San Francisco… Continue

Happy to have received my "sample box" from SF corporate offices of TCHO this week, I could not WAIT to do an early morning tasting. I broker our new gift collections, just released this month, and it was like an early Christmas for me -- opening the express-delivered box and pulling out all the little brown paper squares and the slick-packaged new formulations. What JOY!! OH, and the smell of chocolate from a freshly opened shipping box!! Dreamy.



But on with it..there's tasting to… Continue

Did anyone see this amazing show of chocolate mastery? Tonight I watched Tony's new Spain episode on the Travel Channel, and he visited Enric's workshop outside of Barcelona. Enric crafted something so dramatically amazing and beautiful...just a large chocolate egg, but OH that egg! He started with two halves in molds, melted the edges and voila an egg. He shaped the edges like a sculptor, the beginnings of the Gaudi-esque creation it was to become. The 15 or so eggs, each about one foot high,… Continue