The Ultimate Book of Chocolate


Book Description

In The Ultimate Book of Chocolate trained pastry chef Melanie Dupuis will teach you how to make your chocolate dreams become a reality. Learn how to temper, mould and decorate like a pro with the complete guide to everything chocolate. Starting with the basics, Melanie will take you through all the different varieties of chocolate you will be working as all the other basic ingredients required. She then explains in detail, accompanied with step-by-step pictures, all the various techniques in the book, from tempering to making ganache, chocolate mousse, creme anglaise, biscuit bases, meringue and more. The main recipes include every chocolate dessert you could ever imagine, plus more, from caramel bonbons and millionaire's shortbread to Easter eggs, truffles, macarons, cakes, Swiss rolls, eclairs and more: this truly is a chocoaholic's dream book! With step-by-step photographs and beautiful illustrations, this is a masterclass in making chocolate desserts, from an expert pastry chef. This stunning, large volume with delight anyone with a sweet tooth, or any home cook who wants to take their dessert skills to the next level.




Real Chocolate


Book Description

In Rococo Real Chocolate Chantal Coady, proprietor of London's exquisite Rococo Chocolates in King's Road presents over 50 groundbreaking and highly unusual recipes that anyone can make at home. Painstakingly tested and illustrated with beautiful, easy-to-follow, step-by-step photographs, the book makes the mysterious art of chocolate accessible to the amateur home enthusiast. Coady is an ardent proponent of what she calls "Real Chocolate" and explains the difference between excellent natural ingredients -- the only used in Rococo recipes -- and the over-sweetened, fat and additive-laden confections most widely marketed in the world today. Simply put, "Real Chocolate" is chocolate made with only the very finest all-natural ingredients. Fun to make and divine to taste! Recipes will include basics like plain and flavoured ganaches and truffles, decorative chocolate leaves and curls; unusual offerings like chocolate tempura and white chocolate and cardamom pannacotta, and savory recipes like black beans with ginger and cocoa, and chocolate tapenade. The book is also filled with amazing chocolate lore from irrefutable evidence of chocolate's physical and mental health benefits, to the fact that white chocolate is the closest thing found in nature to human breast milk!




Cocoa


Book Description

Chocolate has long been a favorite indulgence. But behind every chocolate bar we unwrap, there is a world of power struggles and political maneuvering over its most important ingredient: cocoa. In this incisive book, Kristy Leissle reveals how cocoa, which brings pleasure and wealth to relatively few, depends upon an extensive global trade system that exploits the labor of five million growers, as well as countless other workers and vulnerable groups. The reality of this dramatic inequity, she explains, is often masked by the social, cultural, emotional, and economic values humans have placed upon cocoa from its earliest cultivation in Mesoamerica to the present day. Tracing the cocoa value chain from farms in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, through to chocolate factories in Europe and North America, Leissle shows how cocoa has been used as a political tool to wield power over others. Cocoa's politicization is not, however, limitless: it happens within botanical parameters set by the crop itself, and the material reality of its transport, storage, and manufacture into chocolate. As calls for justice in the industry have grown louder, Leissle reveals the possibilities for and constraints upon realizing a truly sustainable and fulfilling livelihood for cocoa growers, and for keeping the world full of chocolate.




Chocolate


Book Description

Chocolate is nearly always with us—when celebrating or mourning, in love or alone, healthy or sick, happy or sad. This book offers a comprehensive look at how an exotic food grew to play such a central role in our lives. No food in the world can offer as storied a history as chocolate. Chocolate: A Cultural Encyclopedia focuses on cocoa's history from ancient Mesoamerican beginnings as a symbol of ritual, life, and death, to its omnipresence in Europe, North America, and the rest of the world. In 10 thematic chapters covering chocolate in society and culture, 80 shorter entries, recipes, and a comprehensive timeline, this new book takes a closer look at how chocolate has served as a medicine, an indulgence, a symbol of decadence, a door to romance, a tempting taboo, a means of survival, and a snack for children and adults alike. Why did popes and kings so fear their chocolate? Who invented milk chocolate, and why was its formula kept secret? Why did soldiers in World War II despise their chocolate rations? Who makes the most chocolate today? Find out the answers to these questions and more as this book tells you everything you wanted to know—and a lot you didn't even know existed—about the seed from the world’s favorite fruit tree.




The Bitter Side of Sweet


Book Description

For fans of Linda Sue Park and A Long Way Gone, two young boys must escape a life of slavery in modern-day Ivory Coast Fifteen-year-old Amadou counts the things that matter. For two years what has mattered are the number of cacao pods he and his younger brother, Seydou, can chop down in a day. The higher the number the safer they are. The higher the number the closer they are to paying off their debt and returning home. Maybe. The problem is Amadou doesn’t know how much he and Seydou owe, and the bosses won’t tell him. The boys only wanted to make money to help their impoverished family, instead they were tricked into forced labor on a plantation in the Ivory Coast. With no hope of escape, all they can do is try their best to stay alive—until Khadija comes into their lives. She’s the first girl who’s ever come to camp, and she’s a wild thing. She fights bravely every day, attempting escape again and again, reminding Amadou what it means to be free. But finally, the bosses break her, and what happens next to the brother he has always tried to protect almost breaks Amadou. The three band together as family and try just once more to escape. Inspired by true-to-life events happening right now, The Bitter Side of Sweet is an exquisitely written tour de force not to be missed. “A gripping and painful portrait of modern-day child slavery in the cacao plantations of the Ivory Coast.”—The Wall Street Journal “A tender, harrowing story of family, friendship, and the pursuit of freedom.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review




Chocolate Fortunes


Book Description

Could there be a more intriguing East-meets-West story than one about the introduction of chocolate-that very symbol of Western indulgence-to legendarily austere China?




Beyond Chocolate


Book Description

Are you unhappy with your body but fed up with constant dieting? Would you like to lose weight without depriving yourself of the food you love? Serial dieters for years, Sophie and Audrey Boss finally overcame their weight problems when they discovered the key to success: break free from the diet mentality and learn how to listen to your body so that you can make food choices that really work for you. This book sets out a new, liberating approach to establishing a healthy and satisfying relationship with food, and a positive body image. Based on extensive research and workshops for women with weight issues, Beyond Chocolate will help you to: Eat whatever you want without feeling guilty· Lose weight and not worry that you'll put it back on· Only think about food when you are hungry· Stop when you are satisfied· Feel comfortable in your body· Wear clothes you like and feel good in Beyond Chocolate is your passport to freedom!




Chocolate and Blackness


Book Description

Silke Hackenesch untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen der Konstruktion schwarzer Identitäten und der Produktion, dem Konsum und der Repräsentation von Schokolade. Dabei werden die oft sklavereiähnlichen Arbeitsbedingungen auf den Kakaoplantagen ebenso analysiert wie die Verflechtung von Schokolade und Schwarzsein in der Werbung, in der Belletristik und in der Populärmusik. Sie zeigt, wie Schokolade als Metapher für Schwarzsein erheblich zur Rassifizierung und Erotisierung schwarzer Körperlichkeit beigetragen, aber immer wieder auch Möglichkeiten zur selbstermächtigenden Verwendung geliefert hat.




Hippie Bob & the Chocolate Factory


Book Description

This publication reflects upon a multitude of themes: relationships, daily occurrences in life, friends, society, and history. The author has tried to present the emotional feelings of both sides in the various stages of relationship development. Men and women ultimately fail to bring possible relationships into the realm of positive development because of false perceptions they assume about the other person. Both sides are afraid to openly communicate thus destroying possible relationships in their embryonic stages of development. Daily occurrences of life affect all of us at one time or another. Every time our routine is affected, our schedule is thrown off center; our emotional makeup creates stressful overtones for those we come in contact with. Some of these situations we recover from quickly; some of them linger in the back of our mind for extended periods of time. Friends have a profound effect upon our life style. Just when we feel we know someone very well they take their behavior mode in a new direction causing us confusion while planting the seeds of doubt in our relationship. Some of these situations are corrected through open diologue; some are destined to remain as we remember them during the last visual contact with this person. Thus all of us at one time or another want to "Turn Back The Clock" and do some repair work. Leaving our house in the morning we come in contact with strangers. Depending upon circumstances once in a while our paths cross as we develop contact. Some assumptions of others are pleasant and grow with the passage of time. Others are ill fated through bad vibrations at the start and have to be severed as soon as possible for our own personal well being. Each of us has a personal history to reflect upon in our memory bank. Thoughts upon family, the town or city where we grew up, a special someone whom we lost contact with all enter into our thoughts from time to time. Again pleasantness and sadness come together as we reflect upon what is and what might have been.




The Secret Life of Chocolate


Book Description

A fascinating guide to the history and medical uses of cacao. The Secret Life of Chocolate is a book about chocolate. Not the sweet, mass-produced fatty confection most of us are familiar with, though. This book is about old-school chocolate; pre-Colombian, Central American, bitter-spicy-foamy-intense blow-your-socks-off chocolate; chocolate beverages made with toasted cocoa beans, water, and indigenous plants. Today there are many different forms of drinking chocolate in Latin America, most of which reflect European (Spanish) influence, incorporating sugar, cinnamon, and milk. The aim of this work is to peel back the years of cultural cross-pollination and anatomize the original Cacao-based beverages, which were richer, more complex, more potent, and darker (in every sense) than modern forms of chocolate. This book delves into the ancient history of the human relationship with the cocoa tree, Theobroma cacao; it dissects the pharmacological properties of chocolate to the fullest possible extent; and it divulges the mythical and magical associations of human interactions with this incredible plant.