Fantastique chocolat!

Bonjour everyone. Ca va?

Ok, that's about all I can remember from my high-school French lessons ~ Oh well. Why am I suddenly speaking French? Well, it has to do with this chocolate shop - La Maison du Chocolat.

I was out shopping with a friend about 2 weekends ago, and happened to walk by this classy (and expensive) looking chocolate shop near the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. She exclaimed "Oooooooh!! We should go in and have a look!" Hey it was chocolate, I'd never say no. And THAT was the beginning of my adventure into the fine arts of chocolate.

I am not going to kid you or myself - it was damn expensive chocolate there. On the otherhand, each piece was like a master piece. There were no fancy gimicky prints on the chocolate, the packaging was simple (basically the entire shop was brown, brown and brown, just like chocolate). There was however a certain elegance about the setup. We bought some truffles and wow they were goooood. The whole thing melted in my mouth with a silkiness that is hard to describe.

So while we were making the purchase, I noticed that they actually hold chocolate appreciation classes. The Tamanaco class (journey in the world of chocolate) cost $55 for a 1.5hr session.

[At this point, I will forgive you for saying: OH NO you DIDN'T... because yes I certainly did]

I left my name with them and they did call me up, and no one was mad enough to go spend $55 US on a chocolate class with me, so I went along by myself. I figured I gotta try it at least before I judged it.

I got there and was greeted by a shop staff who let me to a table and provided me with a cup of hot chocolate. One sip and I was thinking: hmm, no problem - I think it is going to be fine.


We started off the class a brief history of the shop, and the who, what, where and how La Maison du Chocolat selects their cocao beans and eventually make them into couverture (translated: large block of chocolate used to make chocolate bonbons and pastries).

Every now and then, at the relevant points, we got to sample one of their chocolate pieces. We went through a milk chocolate pastille, a 56% dark chocolate pastille and then a 65% dark chocolate pastille. You might think me silly, but oh boy, you could actually TASTE the difference in the quality of that chocolate.


Now that we had the basics completed, we went onto the ganache, which La Maison du Chocolat was famous for.

We sampled a milk-chocolate ganache (I forgot the name of it), the Guayaquil (a dark and bitter sweet ganache with a hint of vanilla), and then the Caracas (a really creamy dark chocolate ganache). What I noticed the most was, while the chocolate was melting away in my mouth against my palate, it was absolutely smooth, no lumps no powdery feel or bitterness and there were no after tastes of any sort once the chocolate was consumed. We also tried the Garrigue, a dark chocolate ganache infused with fennel (for those of you who don't know what fennel tastes like, think aniseed or liquorice). I am not a big fan of that flavour personally, but this ganache I didn't actually mind. It almost tasted somewhat like a really ripe berry and the flavour was very subtle.

But the best part was yet to come - the presenter made fresh lemon infused ganache for us right there!! We all got a cup of it to eat/drink (it was like a thick chocolate soup, with a wonderful aroma of lemon filling up the room as he stirred the cream into the chopped up couverture). The taste was unbelievable - I wish I could bottle the leftovers and take it all home!!


Well - that is the end of me eating junk chocolate - the hershey's bars are going straight to the bin.

But I have to add - I think the hot chocolate on offer at Koko Black in Melbourne is still slightly ahead of the one I tasted in La Maison du Chocolat (it is my personal opinion, but I think maybe the koko Black one has more fat in the cream they use so it feels even more velvety). Anyway I hope the standard at KKB hasn't dropped since I last went there!!

I am going to verify this as soon as I get home! hee hee hee

The Game

After much anticipation, I finally went to my first baseball game. It wasn't in New York, it was in St Louis actually.

As the wrap-up activity for the project I was working on in St Louis, we went to the game of St. Louis Cardinal vs Florida Marlin (thanks guys, I really appreciate you taking me there, and getting me the right-colored gear so I would blend in with the home crowd!!).



So not only did I finally get to experience the ball game atmosphere (ie. the overpriced nachos and Bud Light on draft and the roar of the home crowd cheering), I also had my own personal baseball "intepreter" explaining to me the finer points of watching baseball, what all those numbers on the board acutally meant, and the expected behavior of cheering the team on and participating in mexican waves. It was a lot of fun (especially when the fireworks go off for home-runs).



The game was slow to start with, and things were not moving until the bottom half of the 8th inning when finally, the Cardinals hit a few to load up the bases and then a home run to bring it all home (I am sure if they didn't win, there would have been a riot in the stadium). Maybe I can enjoy it even more the next time around now that I have a little more understanding of the significants of what all the numbers on the board means (I was too distracted by the photo opps, as per usual...).

Bean Town Cow Parade

Once more I was in Boston for work late August so I took the opportunity to go into town again after work. I actually haven't been back into Boston city center itself since the first weekend I got there (and visited Harvard etc).

So I was quite surprise to find lots of cows in the city. They were everywhere, in all kinds of sharps and shade. I started off at the Park Street Metro station...


Proceeded through Boston Common...


Then down to City Hall...


And finally Quincy Marketplace.


The cows all stood still on the busy streets, in the midst of frenzies and watching people zooming by... Ahem, ok.


So I read the plaque near the feet of each cow, and actually each cow had been painted by a different artist with a different sponsor. These cows were going to be auctioned off for charity. Boston was one of the participating cities in the world (offical website: http://boston.cowparade.com/)

Miscellaneous things in August...

It is turning into a monthly update of this blog for me and it is not good. I have been going to places and have kept taking photos (of course), however I have been slack in the actually uploading and write up about the actual activities and eventually they have become so out of date they were not worth mentioning anymore!

The only way for me to catch up to the present, is to take the short-cut and do condensed entries and try to breeze through as quickly as possible what I have been up to.

I went to Brooklyn Bridge last month (and had planned to walk across it but it was like 100F out in the soon so as soon as my and my friends got to the 1st pillar of the bridge on the Manhattan side, we hid in the shade and went no further). This was also about the time when Israel started the bombing of Lebanon so there was a protest march across the bridge when my friends and I were there.






I also visited Coney Island last month. I had a vision of Melbourne's Luna Park in my mind for some reason. It was way bigger and much more alive and packed full of families (school holiday hasn't ended yet), tourists, street performers and beach-goers.


Different food, drink and souvenior stores dotted along the Broadwalk, seperating the beach and the amusement park itself. The famous Cyclone - the first wooden roller-coaster in the world - can be seen from afar. It looked a lot like the Luna Park rollercoaster except 5 times bigger and looking more likely to fall apart (there was apparently an accident not that long ago where one of the roller-carts actually came flying out from the rail and crashed into the carpark below and people were killed so this wasn't a very good joke for me to crack actually).




The other famous thing at Coney Island is of course Nathan's Hot Dog. This is where the annual hot dog eating competition is held in the summer. The 2006 champion Takeru Hobayashi ate 53.75 hot dog in 12 minutes. I am still wondering how he could POSSIBLY (physically) have 53 susages and hot dog buns put into his body - he is skinny as!! Well let's just say, we did not break any record that day eating Nathan's hot dogs (except probably the Single Most Photographed Hot Dog that day...)