Chocolate for all Occasions - a Buyers' Guide

Many people regard chocolate as a gift for Valentine’s Day. We have given consideration as the best holidays for giving chocolates from our personal perspective.

We would both be pleased to receive a box of chocolates on New Year’s Day. Later on in January, Scots throughout the world celebrate Burns Night on 25^th January. The traditional food on Burns Night is haggis, but we would rather have chocolate.

February brings Valentine’s Day and we both hope that our Wonderful Husbands will be bringing us chocolate. In America, Presidents’ Day comes in February. We don’t know if people give gifts for Presidents’ Day but we think that chocolate would be quite a nice surprise.

March offers St Patrick’s Day and all things green. We don’t think that we would like green chocolate, but chocolate in a box with a green bow would be perfect.

Easter is a moveable feast and here in Britain chocolate Easter eggs are a traditional (and welcome) gift.

Summer is probably the low season for chocolate. Pat’s car has smelled of chocolate since a bar of plain chocolate melted in the glove compartment last year.

What about chocolate for Halloween? It works for us.

Advent Calendars often have a little piece of chocolate behind each door, which makes the wait for Christmas somewhat more bearable. And of course chocolate makes an excellent Christmas present.

As well as holidays, there are other occasions when chocolate makes a perfect present. Both of us are delighted to receive chocolate on our birthdays, our wedding anniversaries and as ‘thank you’ gifts.

Sometimes the best gift is one that is given for no particular reason. In our opinion, any day that ends with the letter ‘y’ is a good day for giving chocolate.

Are there any occasions when chocolate might not be suitable?

As mentioned above, think twice about giving chocolate as a gift in hot weather. If it is likely that you might end up giving someone a box of semi-melted chocolates, perhaps another gift would be better.

Chocolate (or any other food) is not a good present on a day of religious fasting. For example, some Christians follow a very restricted diet on Good Friday.

A bride might not appreciate chocolate on her wedding day, especially if she is wearing a traditional white dress.

You can probably tell that we have had to think very hard to come up with occasions when chocolate might not be suitable. This is probably because we both so very fond of chocolate.

Whatever the occasion, when you are giving chocolate as a present, we think it is a good idea to try to give the type of chocolate that your recipient likes best, for example plain, milk or white chocolate.

Chocolate is made by roasting cocoa beans and then grinding them up to yield ‘cocoa liquor’.   Cocoa liquor is about half cocoa solids and half cocoa butter (which is basically the fat from the beans.)  The cocoa solids and butter are processed to make the different varieties of chocolate.

Plain chocolate is sometimes referred to as Dark or Continental chocolate.  In America it is sometimes called semisweet or bittersweet chocolate.

Milk chocolate is made by replacing some of the cocoa solids with milk products, such as condensed  or dried milk.  This gives the chocolate a sweeter taste and a lighter colour.

White chocolate is technically not chocolate at all, because it doesn’t contain any cocoa solids.  It contains cocoa butter along with milk products.

Is Chocolate good for you?

We know that it tastes good and makes us feel happy, which in our opinion is a good thing.

According to some scientific studies, plain chocolate is good for you.  Of course, that means a fairly small amount of plain chocolate.

We have read that eating 2 ounces (50 grams) of plain chocolate per day, with the chocolate having a minimum of 70% cocoa solids can be beneficial to health.  The benefits attributed to eating this small (note the emphasis on small) amount of high quality dark chocolate include protection against heart disease, high blood pressure, and it may have as many anti-oxidents as a glass of red wine.

These claims are not applied to milk chocolate or white chocolate

We must point out that we are not scientists, nor have we carried out any test.  This is only what we have read and should be treated with the same scepticism as anything else you read on the Internet.

What we do know (from experience) is that if you eat a lot of chocolate (like way more than 50 grams) every day, or even every other day and keep up eating all the other stuff your regularly eat – then you are likely to gain weight.

A summary of our experience could be expressed thus :  Extra Food Input = Extra Weight (especially on the hips).

That said, we plan to continue eating chocolate, at least in moderation.  At the same time, we will continue our regular exercise programme.

When we were planning this article Pat commented that she likes plain chocolate best.  Tricia replied that she likes any chocolate if it comes in a pretty gold box with a ribbon.

This caused us to consider the questioning of packaging; we came to the conclusion that when giving chocolate as a gift it should be nicely packaged.

If we were buying chocolate for ourselves we wouldn’t mind a few chocolate truffles in a paper bag, or a plainly wrapped bar of chocolate.

However, it makes much more of a statement to hand over a prettily wrapped box of chocolates; even a small box can look like a special treat if it is well presented.

Chocolate retailers take the matter of presentation very seriously, as Pat learned when she was taking the photos for this Hub.  She had just lined up a shot of some chocolates outside a shop in Churchill Square shopping centre when the sales assistant scurried out and told her that photos are not allowed!  The assistant explained that all staff are under strict instructions to forbid photos of the packaging or displays in case their marketing ideas are copied.

A quick trawl through Internet articles leads us to conclude that there may be some environmental problems with chocolate.  We have read that space has been made to grow cacao beans by stripping away a vast area of rain forest.

Some chocolate is labelled as ‘organic’ and that might possibly mean that the growing of the beans did not damage the environment, but we really can’t prove that one way or another.

The other ethical issue with chocolate is that sometimes the growers are paid very low prices, or the people who work on cacao farms are virtually slave labour.

Fortunately, there is a growing trend towards Fairtrade Chocolate.  When chocolate is labelled ‘Fairtrade’ it means that the farmers and labourers are paid a fair price.  This is not just a sales device; there is an international certification process to ensure that when something says it is Fairtrade that specific conditions are met.

A few years ago Fairtrade Chocolate was difficult to find.  In our locality the only place to buy Fairtrade Chocolate was in our Oxfam shop.   A few weeks ago we asked where they had hidden the chocolate and was told that Oxfam have stopped selling Fairtrade Chocolate (at least locally). Oxfam now consider that Fairtrade Chocolate is now ‘mainstream’; they have succeeded in educated the buying public.

We note with delight that here in Britain, Kit Kat (a very mainstream brand of chocolate bar) is now made with Fairtrade chocolate.

We both think chocolate cake is simply divine.  We know that in America it is sometimes called Devil’s Food cake, but that must because it is such a temptation.

There is a shop in Brighton called Chockywockydoodah, selling all things chocolate (of course), including wedding cakes.  You may recall that we said afterwards we might not give a bride chocolate on her wedding day.  That said chocolate wedding cakes have proved very popular – with the guests as well as happy couples.

The cakes are usually decorated with white chocolate, but the cake inside is dark chocolate.  Delicious.